Journalism in Decline

The Dan Rather memos are back. CBS's (with emphasis on the BS) is supposed to be releasing their investigation into the scandal soon, and ahead of that the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) has published an article attacking, not CBS, but the bloggers that revealed the whole fraud. The author of the piece, Corey Pein, an Evergreen graduate no less, but he goes on to show that the new standard for journalism is in fact "fake but accurate". Powerline has the lowdown.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/

Corey Pein of the Columbia Journalism Review sent us an email yesterday, with a link to his article in that magazine on the fake 60 Minutes documents. "You may be interested in this," he wrote. We were interested, all right, but we're sorry to report that the article is astonishingly bad.

Pein's perspective is sympathetic to Dan Rather, Mary Mapes and CBS, and hostile toward the bloggers and others who exposed the fraud that 60 Minutes participated in, intentionally or otherwise. This gives his article a weirdly off-balance perspective. Pein holds out hope that the documents may not have been forgeries after all. He writes that:

We don’t know whether the memos were forged, authentic, or some combination
thereof. Indeed, they could be fake but accurate, as Killian’s secretary, Marian
Carr Knox, told CBS on September 15.

So this is now, apparently, an accepted journalistic standard: fake
but
accurate. Which means, I guess: fake, but they help the Democratic
candidate. Again, Pein says:

Ultimately, we don’t know enough to justify the conventional wisdom: that the documents were “apparently bogus” (as Howard Kurtz put it, reporting on Dan Rather’s resignation) and that a major news network was an accomplice to political slander.

Pein concludes with the wistful thought that maybe the mainstream media in general, and CBS in particular, didn't
have to take a hit in connection with Memogate: