Pick a little, talk a lot

What the incident with Dan Rather's reporting on CBS News indicates about the blog world's priorities suggests that it's a medium that's inclined to take small details and make a big story out of them. Their criticism of the authenticity of the memos CBS used to base their reporting on the story about President George W. Bush receiving preferential treatment when he was serving in the Texas Air National Guard began with typography and questions on the capabilities of 1970's era typewriters.

That's a small technicality, and whether it's valid or not, my question is--if we're looking for something to attest to President Bush's character, if we're trying to develop or discredit his campaign through a character study, then the logical source would be the people who knew him.

Whether or not the memo is critical, where I would have gone, if I were the reporter on the story, I would have worked first to track down anyone who served with Bush in the military and get their comments on his service before even breaking the news about the memos.

And their comments and their biographies, which definitely shifts the perspective from which their comments come, would have been central to supporting or refuting the memo. I'm not even certain, based on the coverage, whether there's more of a story there than to discuss the possibility of Bush's record having been tidied up a bit before it was exposed to the public eye, without slinging any actual accusations of whether it was or wasn't.

The dynamic we see in effect here is that bloggers have an impact on what the main stream media is covering, and how they're approaching those stories. CBS News's choice to encrypt their report on the findings related to Bush's military service so that they can't be copied looks like an effort to make a blogger's life more difficult as he or she is trying to comment on the report. It suggests they don't want that information recirculated. Which also indicates that there's a little bit of fear, perhaps, or apprehension toward what is being said on those circles and how much influence it has.

I do think bloggers have critical and valuable things to contribute to communication around the country. A blog is a powerful tool for a democracy. It's a muscle to fight back against the strong arm of media conglomerates. But, I'll return to the comparison I made in "Rather a Scandal" that the blogosphere sometimes functions like mob rule. It can take a rumor or an idea and catapult it into national headlines.

And if you take what one semi-credible source has to say about typography and use that to discredit a memo used as the basis of a story on whether or not our President served well during his time in the national guard, you run the risk of making typewriter specs the leading story on the evening news, and that's not the most useful story CBS could be covering.

Blogs aren't the only place responsible for misdirecting the press. As discussed in "Playing 'whack-a-mole'" by Doublas MacKinnon , the media can also get themselves caught up in cycles that mismanage information.

It's fair to say that the task of a journalist, or a blogger, is to find the little details and use them to tell a big story. But the responsibility is to make sure that the big story is one that deserves to get that big.