CJR: We'd Ra^ther Not Talk About It

The Columbia University School of Journalism is said to be one of the preeminent institutions in its field. It awards the Pulitzer Prize. So you might be interested to know how the Columbia Journalism Review's website, "Campaign Desk", has covered Ra^therGate.

At 3:48pm on September 9th, the day after the infamous 60 Minutes II episode aired, Campaign Desk had this to say:

the real news made last night by "60 Minutes II" was the revelation of personal memos kept by one Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, Bush's squadron commander in Texas.
Stay tuned, dear readers. Tracking the press performance on this story in days to come will be as interesting as tracking way [sic] the politics of it all unfolds.

That was after bloggers had been pointing to evidence of possible forgery for the better part of a day, and it was more than an hour after Bill Ardolino at InDC had published his interview with respected forensic document examiner Dr. Philip Bouffard. Bouffard, though he had not yet rendered a final verdict, stated that there was at least a 90% chance the memos were fakes.

Four days later, after a Boston Globe headline falsely claimed "Authenticity backed on Bush documents" (it was later forced by Ardolino to retract), after an early pioneer in computer typesetting explained in depth why the memos were laughable fakes, after CBS' "trump card" for authenticating the documents had called them "forgeries," after bloggers at Beldar and Powerline discovered that CBS' lead "document expert" was a handwriting specialist with no apparent typographic expertise, after scores of blog posts by servicemen had pointed to errors in the format and content of the memos, and after Charles Johnson had demonstrated the highly unlikely coincidence that the documents were almost identical matches for ones dashed off in Microsoft Word with the default settings, CJR's website had this to say about RatherGate:

[September 13]
Mostly, the frenzy consists of various bloggers swearing on the lives of their mothers that the Killian memos are authentic, and an equal number of bloggers swearing on the lives of their fathers that the Killian memos are fabricated.

These folks couldn't find a story in a library.

The next day, Campaign Desk finally felt compelled to say something about the flaming pink donkey in the center of the room:

[September 14]
A few readers have asked why Campaign Desk hasn't weighed in on the furor over the disputed CBS documents purporting to show President Bush slacking from his National Guard duties 32 years ago. (Indeed, the Weekly Standard Online today declared the CBS flap "the biggest media story in recent memory" -- having apparently expunged from its memory both the Jayson Blair affair and the press's failure to examine the pre-war rationale for the invasion of Iraq.)

"America's Premier Media Monitor," believes that Blair's plagiarism and fictionalization of stories like the homecoming of Pfc. Jessica Lynch is bigger news than CBS's use of memos that it knew to be questionable in a hit piece on the president of the United States with less than two months to go to the election.

As for "the press's failure to examine the pre-war rationale for the invasion of Iraq," it apparently consists of the fact that critical stories sometimes ran on page A17 instead of page A1. Or maybe there weren't enough of those stories, or they didn't have the right message, in CJR's view. Even if those criticisms are valid, do they trump the apparent efforts of the fifth estate to become a fifth column, deliberately suppressing concerns over documentary evidence in a story that might have affected the selection of the leader of the free world? You be the judge.

Campaign Desk goes on to explain why it has been mum on Dan:

The short answer to the question is, we're not in the business of saying, "You may be a bad boy; drink your medicine." We're in the business of saying "You are a bad boy; drink your medicine."

I wonder which class at Columbia teaches that the role of a media watchdog is to wait for someone else to check out a controversial story and then offer belated commentary?

The Campaign Desk piece then acknowledges the September 13th Washington Post article, but ignores all other sources indicating the fraudulent nature of the memos. They then downplay the significance of the story by lamenting that it is a distraction from the issues:

we do know this: The whole furor has once again turned the campaign press away from the issues that will define daily life for the next four years.

Which is to say, "[t]racking the press performance on this story," is no longer "as interesting as tracking way the politics of it all unfolds," now that the press's performance is starting to evoke the sedition flick Seven Days in May.

As of September 18th, the CJR's last word on the subject is a snide little piece attempting to belittle the contributions of PajamaLand. It cites, with no critical analysis of its own, several left-wing bloggers who deny that the Pajamahaddeen contributed anything of substance to the story. At no point is there any mention of the obvious evidence (some of it linked-to above) that bloggers broke the story with expert testimony and insightful analysis.

Rounding out its September 15th post, the Campaign Desk defends the Los Angeles Times' assertion that "CBS' real error was trying to prove a point that didn't really need to be proved," offering as support:

the Ben Barnes segment of the CBS broadcast, which preceded the Killian document presentation -- not to mention numerous reports from last February confirming what has come to be known as the Alabama Absence.)

They end with a few words of derision for bloggers: "Maybe it's time to change out of those pajamas and get some fresh air."

Apparently the folks at Campaign Desk missed this Associated Press story, also in February, about a National Guard officer who remembers seeing Bush repeatedly in Alabama during the dates in question. Perhaps they were too busy with all that fancy journalism they do to type the phrase "remembers seeing Bush Alabama" into Google. (But then what do I know, I'm just some guy in pajamas).

Nor do they mention: that Barnes can't seem to remember with any consistency what political office he held in Texas when he was supposedly playing puppet-master for the Bush family; why he felt it was strategically important to curry favor with George H. W. Bush, a lowly freshman Republican congressman in 1968 (the year G. W. Bush entered the Guard), at a time when Texas was dominated by a Democratic political machine; that Barnes is the "third largest all-around Democratic donor" in America, or that Barnes' own daughter says he told her he is lying about president Bush. Nor have they subsequently updated their article to reflect the statement of retired Col. Walter Staudt, the man who swore George W. Bush into the Guard:

"He [president Bush] didn't use political influence to get into the Air National Guard…. I was the one who did it and I was the one who was there and I didn't talk to any of them."

So, there you have it folks. If this is what the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism has to offer, I think we'd be better off getting our reporters from the Arthur Murray School of Dance.