CBS stonewalls as "guys in pajamas" uncover a fraud.
John Fund takes a look at the CBS forgery scandal and how it is developing. As he points out, a self-aggrandizing spokescreature from the tiffany network went on Fox to explain the stonewalling and lies coming out from behind the drawbridge and moats of the Elite Media Monoculture. CBS toady Jonathan Klein argued that his organization has "multiple layers of check and balances" whilst bloggers are "sitting around in their pajamas." Well, first off let me all inform you that my fashion choice for today is a pair of jeans and a black polo shirt which also happens to be the favorite of Steve Jobs. Just thought you would like to know. I got them from Lands' End, a great place to buy classic clothing by the way. But now, on to business.
Journalists have an ingrained problem insofar as they are not specialists in any area but their own, which is the field of reporting itself. But as a group they are not students of any other field of study. They are not scientists, or architects or graphic artists or experts in the history of Medieval Japan. They report what others tell them, but they rarely have first hand knowledge themselves. Thus they must depend on the truthfulness of what others tell them. And as knowledge becomes more and more complex and specialized, it becomes more difficult to use this approach without falling prey to those with an axe to grind. If a young and hate-filled leftist from the Democratic party or the Kerry campaign wants to use The Elite Media Monoculture to smear the President with forged documents, it turns out to be easy, especially given CBS's own desire to believe that such documents are the real deal. And if the media does not think there is any reason to question them and if they rely only on the opinions of those who share their own narrow political bias, then they will go on the air with little or no examination by those who might be able to validate them based on real world experience.
Of course the real problem for CBS is that we are in a new world of information and they have not caught up to the reality yet. The new media consists of talk radio, cable news and the Internet. And the Internet, in particular, is making it impossible for the fraud of The Elite Media Monoculture to be perpetrated as it once would have been. The Internet allows experts of every kind to now have a voice and to evaluate the news and information we get from the MSM in such a way as to pass it all through a very fine tooth comb. Huge numbers of regular people from all walks of life and from every field of expertise can now share their knowledge and understanding in real time with everyone else who is interested in following the same story. The number of such people that can be brought to bear on any intellectual issue, news item or argument dwarfs what The Elite Media Monoculture can hope to match. The result of this process is that it is more and more difficult to fake competence in any particular field or put forth an obvious falsehood when so many authentic experts can now talk to each other in real time using their computers and the Internet.
This story has spread like wildfire across the Internet mainly because the people who know about the issues involved could see almost at once that there were big problems with the CBS story. Dan Rather and his minions did not count on the distributed intelligence of the Internet, but they should have. They should have known that there is now a real and active 24/7 fact-checking army of specialists out here in cyberspace and we are now watching The Elite Media Monoculture for anything which might be suspicious or incorrect. Yes, Dan; we are watching the watchers.
Like a hawk.
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