The Filter Bubble - Eli Pariser [21]
When CBS News announced nine weeks before the 2004 election that it had papers proving that President Bush had manipulated his military record, the assertion seemed as though it might be the turning point for the Kerry campaign, which had been running behind in the polls. The viewership for 60 Minutes Wednesday was high. “Tonight, we have new documents and new information on the President’s military service and the first-ever interview with the man who says he pulled the strings to get young George W. Bush into the Texas Air National Guard,” Dan Rather said somberly as he laid out the facts.
That night, as the New York Times was preparing its headline on the story, a lawyer and conservative activist named Harry MacDougald posted to a right-wing forum called Freerepublic .com. After looking closely at the typeface of the documents, MacDougald was convinced that there was something fishy going on. He didn’t beat around the bush: “I am saying these documents are forgeries, run through a copier for 15 generations to make them look old,” he wrote. “This should be pursued aggressively.”
MacDougald’s post quickly attracted attention, and the discussion about the forgeries jumped to two other blog communities, Powerline and Little Green Footballs, where readers quickly discovered other anachronistic quirks. By the next afternoon, the influential Drudge Report had the campaign reporters talking about the validity of the documents. And the following day, September 10, the Associated Press, New York Times, Washington Post, and other outlets all carried the story: CBS’s scoop might not be true. By September 20, the president of CBS News had issued a statement on the documents: “Based on what we now know, CBS News cannot prove that the documents are authentic.... We should not have used them.” While the full truth of Bush’s military record never came to light, Rather, one of the most prominent journalists in the world, retired in disgrace the next year.
Rathergate is now an enduring part of the mythology about the way blogs and the Internet have changed the game of journalism. No matter where you stand on the politics involved, it’s an inspiring tale: MacDougald, an activist on a home computer, discovered the truth, took down one of the biggest figures in journalism, and changed the course of an election.
But this version of the story omits a critical point.
In the twelve days between CBS’s airing of the story and its public acknowledgment that the documents were probably fakes, the rest of the broadcast news media turned out reams of reportage. The Associated Press and USA Today hired professional document reviewers who scrutinized every dot and character. Cable news networks issued breathless updates. A striking 65 percent of Americans—and nearly 100 percent of the political and reportorial classes—were paying attention to the story.
It is only because these news sources reached many of the same people who watch CBS News that CBS could not afford to ignore the story. MacDougald and his allies may have lit the match, but it took print and broadcast media to fan the flames into a career-burning conflagration.
Rathergate, in other words, is a good story about how online and broadcast media can interact. But it tells us little or nothing about how news will move once the broadcast era is fully over—and we’re moving toward that moment at a breakneck pace. The question we have to ask is, What does news look like in the postbroadcast world? How does it move? And what impact does it have?
If the power to shape news rests in the hands of bits of code, not professional human editors, is the code up to the task? If the news environment becomes so fragmented that MacDougald’s discovery can’t reach a broad audience, could Rathergate even happen at all?
Before we can answer that question, it’s worth quickly reviewing where our current news system came from.
The Rise and Fall of the General Audience