Like cheering for the home team, I'm fully enjoying the glee of the blogger-world as they go toe-to-toe with Mainstream Media (MSM) a.k.a. Dan Rather and CBS. I have no particular animus toward Mr. Rather, but his and their, well, shall we call it 'dullness of intellect' regarding the forgery scandal have created the credibility vacuum into which bright-eyed bloggers have swarmed.

For those of you unfamiliar with the story, Rather attempted a 60 Minutes expose' of alleged shortcomings in President Bush's National Guard record based on documents that now appear to be thinly-veiled forgeries. The typescript of the memos is consistent with having been created in Microsoft Word rather than on the typewriters available at the time. This was discovered, not by the vaunted and anonymous experts cited as authenticators by CBS, but by bloggers who did a little detective work of their own and published the results. This uppitiness does not make MSM smile.

What's fun about this is that CBS continues, as of this writing, to defend the authenticity of the documents against a proponderance of evidence. And what's most fun about that is the appearance of commentary like this:

"Key to the unraveling of CBS's hyped documents, as bloggers pointed out, were the superscript 'th' and the Times New Roman font used in the alleged Killian memo, both of which seem to belong to a rather modern Microsoft Word default letter-writing program rather than a 1972-era typewriter.

Make that yet another victory for the nerds, but not nerds in pajamas , as former CBS executive Jonathan Klein said in an attempt to impugn bloggers. 'You couldn't have a starker contrast between the multiple layers of checks and balances (at '60 Minutes') and a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing,' said Klein. (Emphasis added.) The implication that bloggers are slacker dust bunnies has delighted bloggers, the best of whom are lawyers, professors, scientists, renegade journalists and techies of various sorts . . .

Well, I can't measure up to the credentials of the lawyers, professors, scientists and the like, but I certainly can blog in my pajamas. What a party! If you want to join in, just visit www.blogger.com. And get a comfortable pair of slippers.

1 Comment

1. Roz on 10:31 AM

   Oh, this is fun. Hope you're lucky enough to link before it gets pulled.
   
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