'Old' media still don't get it

The week that was supposed to mark the beginning of John Kerry’s comeback ended with the Democratic nominee for president officially giving up on competing in five states formerly considered “battleground” states. One of these now-conceded states is Virginia. Less than three weeks ago, vice presidential candidate John Edwards came to Roanoke, amid speculation that Kerry-Edwards would put the Old Dominion in play.

Now comes word from the Kerry campaign that, along with Virginia, they are discontinuing their advertising in Arizona, Colorado, Louisiana and Missouri, states with a total of 52 electoral votes. Someone needs to get the word to the Virginia Democratic Party, whose Web page still refers to Virginia as a battleground state. On the other hand, Virginia Democrats are frightened enough that their executive secretary, now secretary of the Virginia Board of Elections, denied independent candidate Ralph Nader a place on the Virginia ballot.

When Kerry was riding high enough to send his VP to Roanoke, his campaign talked openly of winning 400-plus electoral votes. While this Democratic dream may still come true, it now requires a complete reversal of opinion trends in the country, where before it required only that existing trends continue.

Then came the ads from Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the very successful Republican National Convention, and what is likely to provide yet another bounce for Bush, the forged memos flap. All three of these Democratic disasters have something in common: the Democrats never saw them coming, and failed to prepare for them. And in all three cases, the fault lies largely with old and established news organizations that still refuse to acknowledge their new competition.

There is an animated Disney film that portrays dinosaurs contentedly munching on trees as the meteorite that would destroy their world flies overhead. A few of the dinosaurs give the phenomenon a quick glance, then go back to their meal, oblivious. This provides a perfect parallel for the mainstream media’s reaction to the Swift Boat ads when they first appeared. They believed that if they didn’t cover the controversy, it would soon go away.

This brings us to the current scandal over the “newly discovered” memos that CBS and Dan Rather hoped to use to torpedo George W. Bush’s candidacy. By now, the evidence that the memos are fakes is well-known: the wrong type font, curly apostrophes, and superscript letters. In addition, the alleged memo-writer’s widow, son and commanding officer have all reported that he didn’t write memos, didn’t type, didn’t have Microsoft Word in 1972, and didn’t have negative feelings about Lt. George W. Bush.

Speculation following these revelations has revolved around who provided the faked memos to CBS. There is a substantive issue here also. If the Kerry people can’t come up with a forgery convincing enough for the U.S. media, how are they going to manage counterintelligence operations against al-Qaeda? Also interesting is why Dan Rather and CBS thought they could get away with using such obvious fakes. They did not do much fact-checking, or show the memos to enough document experts before they went on the air. This sort of thoroughness used to be called “reporting.”

While some pundits see ideological blinders at work here, it has more to do with the arrogance that comes from believing you have a monopoly. If anyone at CBS thought that the memos might be called into question, they probably also thought not too many people would hear the question. The so-called Big Four networks (CBS, ABC, NBC and CNN) rarely, if ever, comment on each other’s content, nor is there much difference between what the networks consider newsworthy and what the major newspapers cover.

But that meteor overhead, representing Fox News, talk radio and the Internet, has indeed changed the world. Questions about the memos started on Internet blogs, progressed to sites like the Drudge Report, thence to conservative talk radio, thence to Fox News. (During the Republican Convention, Fox drew more viewers than any of the broadcast networks; it marked the first time a cable station had done so.) By week’s end, Rather was on the air defending himself, with the deer in the headlights look that immediately precedes the end of the line for a schoolyard bully.

Democracy has come to the airwaves. Whatever Democrat came up with these forged memos doesn't get it. The Democratic sympathizers at CBS who found them newsworthy don’t get it. They are still placidly munching away, dinosaur-like.

As part of his planned comeback, Kerry started telling audiences that the “W” in George W. Bush stands for “wrong,” reviving a strategy that I’m sure was effective when Kerry ran for president of his seventh grade. The trouble is he makes people wonder what the “F” in John F. Kerry stands for. After this week, it could be flip-flop, forgery, faked, fraudulent, forlorn or free fall.