The Dan Rather Double Whammy

It was interesting that the article was written by Howard Kurtz. I know that he works at Fox News now and knew very little about his work prior to Fox. I did a little more research on him and learned that in addition to working for the Washington Post, he also once worked at CNN and then switched to Fox News in 2013. I guess he had criticized Fox News prior to working there and had written a book about how the Clinton administration was able to spin certain scandals and controversies. He actually has a pretty interesting history.

Based on the publication date of the article (2004), it appears that the article was published around the time that blogging on the web really started to begin. That must have been in the early days of the web and people were asking many of the same questions that people are asking today about blogging. Of course, back then, I am assuming that there were much less blogs and very limited, if any social media. I am also assuming that citizen journalism wasn’t nearly as prevalent back then as it is today. The only social media outlet that may have existed around that time was MySpace, but I’m honestly not sure how influential it would have been at the time. But the blogosphere was likely much less saturated back then than it is today and blogs must have also had a harder time taking off than they do today without social media.

For some reason, the article was a little bit of a harder read for me. Maybe I am just a little off today. But it seemed as though it assumed the reader knew a lot about what had happened. I knew very little and had to do some research about the incident to fill in some of the gaps. This is probably due to the fact that I am reading this article 13 years later – almost exactly. 

It was interesting how the former CEO of CBS said that bloggers have no checks and balances. While there is certainly some truth to that, especially with today’s concerns about fake news, the bloggers were the ones that provided checks and balances against 60 Minutes. 

I read that Dan Rather still says the bloggers never proved the documents were fraudulent. Which was interesting, especially considering that both he and CBS retracted the story at the time. I guess he also attempted to sue CBS for making him a scapegoat in the story.

This situation applies to what we are discussing in class in a lot of different ways. The first is that independent bloggers were able to give the mainstream media a “black eye.” Because bloggers are so independent, they can pick up on things that the mainstream media would generally miss, which makes them very valuable. The second part is that Rather later complained on Bill Maher’s show in 2012, that his corporate bosses were uncomfortable with running the story and it ultimately led to his departure. This brings up the point we’ve been talking about in class about how corporate influence of stories can be bad for the industry.