I'm sorry, Virginia, there is no Santa Claus. And there are no conspiracies.
As I surf around the internet, I am struck by how many bloggers and even more blog readers are convinced that the Rather/CBS scandal was a sign of a liberal conspiracy to discredit Bush and the war. There is a strongly held belief that liberal politicians and the media are working in secret and in tandom to put Kerry into power. Are bloggers in on the conspiracy, too? Read the heated comments in this post by Henry at Crooked Timber.
First, there are no conspiracies. Nobody was in the grassy knoll. The CIA wasn't responsible for AIDs and the crack epidemic. Why do I know this? It's human nature. People can't keep secrets and people can't agree. It would be impossible for all the members of the mainstream news sources and top political leaders to pull off a plan to dethrown Bush without somebody leaking information.
Second, there may be some media bias, but not that much. Yes, the top reporters and newscasters might vote for Democrats, but those news sources are owned by major corporations that are led by Republican voters. GE has some influence over the NBC news.
I'm also struck by the number of conservative bloggers who simultaneously argue that 1. bloggers are very influential and 2. the media is biased. Instapundit makes these claims all the time. You can't have it both ways. If the members of the media are cravenly disregarding the truth to push forward their political beliefs, then they would scarsely be moved by the arguments of a conservative blogger.
Journalists go for the good story. If a Democrat does something stupid that will boost viewership, you can be sure it will be the lead item on the nightly news. I'm sure that Clinton wished he had more control over the media during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
Journalists make mistakes. There might very well be some neglect in checking out stories or investigating some matters. Last week, I played around with the idea that the CBS scandal grew out of a sophomoric prank by a low level intern at CBS. (Well, I got the Kinkos part right.) Last week, Andrew Sullivan played around with the idea that Rather was just predisposed to belief the story, so he failed to fully investigate it. Not that he knowingly ran with a false story. I'm not sure how much Rather has much to do with the nightly news anymore, but Sullivan's story is plauciable.
Journalists desire credibility more than political victories. This appearence of credibility brings readers/viewers and ad sales. If they tilt one way of the other, they lose these sources of revenue. They might tilt a little bit one way or the other, but not that much. The CBS news scandal has resulted in a huge hit in viewership at the network. The Times lost out bigtime by the Jayson Blair scandal. These periodic lapses in judgement are useful reality checks for news organizations.
Anyhow, the claims of the blogsphere as the lone source of truth in a world tightly controlled by one political ideology or another leaves me cold. I would love to know who they think is masterminding that operation. The blogosphere as media fact checkers and agenda setters is a much more sane argument.
