[Note: For a summary of Rathergate so far, see here.]
What do CBS and suicide bombers have in common? They have each taken their chosen form of political intervention to its appalling and self-destructive logical conclusion, and have thereby, as PowerLine very perceptively points out, changed the world in somewhat analogous ways:
Before September 11, important aspects of our security arrangements were based on the assumption that people, even terrorists, want to live. For example, airlines followed the rule that if a passenger's bags were checked but the person failed to appear for the flight, his bags would be removed from the airplane. The idea was that a bomb could have been planted in the luggage. But as long as the passenger was on the airplane, it was assumed that his bags were safe, since no one -- it was thought -- would blow up an airplane with himself on it. After September 11, security arrangements were changed to take into account the new reality (or newly recognized reality) of the suicide bomber.
When he defended CBS's publication of forged documents, Dan Rather spoke of the "checks and balances" that ensure the reliability of news coming from CBS, as opposed to news and commentary from the blogosphere. What are those checks and balances? Ultimately, the main check on the danger that a powerful media giant like CBS might abuse its position of trust by deliberately propagating falsehoods is the assumption that the network values its reputation for accuracy and trustworthiness. In the past, most people have assumed that while broadcast networks, wire services like the Associated Press, and newspapers will occasionally make mistakes, and will certainly spin the news consistent with their political biases, concern for their reputation in the marketplace, and even more among their peers, would prevent them from spreading outright falsehoods.
In the wake of the CBS scandal, that assumption must be reevaluated.
Yes. But also, given this and many other recent scandals with a similar aetiology, we have to doubt that newspapers and television networks ever deserved the trust that was placed in them. We may well be witnessing a significant moment in the history of news media: a radical restructuring of patterns of criticism and authentication into a decentralised and non-authoritarian form.
This is not (as some have said) the end of the traditional news media. Quite the contrary, for just as Karl Popper said that the point of politics is not ‘who should rule’ but how bad rulers and bad policies can be replaced, so the point of (news-oriented) blogs is not to replace news organisations: it is to cause bad stories and bad reporters to be replaced. Which is to the benefit of everyone, traditional news media included.
We expect that among these benefits will eventually be the destruction of the culture of manipulation and left-wing paternalism in the traditional media, which has done so much harm (as well as some occasional good, by the way) over so many decades. But we also hope that that will be only the beginning. Who knows what the first ever society with deservedly high-reputation news media will be like?
