Book Description

The New Media In September of 2004, the CBS News program “60 Minutes II” ran a special on President George Bush’s service in the Texas National Guard during the Vietnam War. One of the pieces of data they displayed was a memo allegedly written by the late Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian. As soon as the memo flashed across the screen, the New Media began an investigation that would lead to in the firing of three CBS News executives and the retirement of longtime anchor Dan Rather. At issue was a simple question: was the memo authentic? CBS News assured the public it was, citing handwriting and document experts. Within 24 hours, the New Media had shown that such was not the case, that the memos could not have been produced on any machine in the hands of the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam era. The New Media quickly demonstrated that the proportional spacing of the memo and the superscripting of dates were nearly impossible to create on 1970s technology and that the layout of the memo was unlike anything produced at the time. In short, they showed that the memo was not created on a Texas National Guard typewriter as CBS News had alleged, but was instead produced on a modern computer using Microsoft Word on its default settings and faxed or copied repeatedly to make it look old. They showed, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the memo was a fake. As word of the fraud spread across the internet, additional data came to the fore, questioning the use of CBS news’ acquisition and handling of the documents. Within a week, other major news organizations began reporting on the controversy, within two weeks, CBS itself reported that they had been misled by their source concerning the origin of the memo. Soon after, CBS brought in a former attorney general and a former president of the Associated Press to get to the bottom of the issue. The result was a shakeup of the entire CBS news structure. Who was this “New Media” that was knowledgeable enough about such arcane topics as superscripting and National Guard memo layouts to shake up one of the biggest news outfits in the world in a matter of weeks? It was a network of independent bloggers who posted their findings in real time, shared information, and tested ideas. And their posts were followed closely by millions of readers, many of whom posted the findings on their own blogs for their own readers. As those readers shared the information with friends and colleagues, interest in the New Media, and the habit of readers looking for their news from independent sources, accelerated a climb that began when Matt Drudge reported rumors of what became the Monica Lewinski scandal several months before the Old Media whispered a word publicly about it.