Bush AWOL: Media pathology

One of James Randi's rules for successful prophecy is to take credit for your "hits."  (Another is to let people forget about your misses.)

In the spirit of the former, I'll modestly note that I wrote a few days ago:

The more I look at the "forgery" aspect of the story, the more it looks like a potential case study for Bob Somerby of the Daily Howler. 

(I can confirm that the content of that statement matches what I was thinking at the time, although I can't provide an independent witness who will swear they saw me actually typing those words.)

And sure enough, the Howler is on the case!  Starting with his installment of 09/15/04, scroll down to "Liberal Bias in Action").  And he continues today (09/16/04).  Dealing with the case of Killian's ex-secretary Marian Knox, Somerby does what we are unlikely to see many Big Pundits doing:  he actually thinks critically about what her story tells us:

For the record, Knox is 86, but she did seem quite cogent. Her assessment? The memos are fake, but the info is accurate! The mystery got deeper—and more entertaining. This storm will be here for a while.

Yes, if we were movie producers, we’d cast the fascinating, feisty Knox in our next feature film. But might we add a word of caution? ...

Before last night, no one had ever set eyes on Knox. No one knows if she is reliable. No one knows if she is cogent; no one knows if she is a kook. She seemed to be cogent, but is she really? In point of fact, there’s no way to tell. Is she right when she says she didn’t type these docs? If we decide to credit this claim, we’re deciding to trust the uncorroborated judgment and memory of a 86-year-old woman. More specifically, we’re trusting the judgment and memory of an 86-year-old woman about fairly trivial matters that occurred 32 years ago!

Are Knox’s claims accurate? We don’t have a clue. By any normal human standard, 32-year-old memories should be highly suspect, especially when they come from people who have no public track record. But increasingly, we live in a fictional world, where news orgs hand us fictional fare. Last night, via Knox, the mystery deepened. Few people are going to note that her statements lack verification. (my emphasis in this paragraph)

And he muses that the Swift Boat Liars for Bush episode gives us a good example of why such caution is in order:

How should we react when strangers make striking claims—striking claims which haven’t been proven? Wiser people will withhold their judgment. But that isn’t how today’s press corps does business. Indeed, in the summer of 2004, a group of men with no track record showed up in public and began trashing John Kerry, making claims about ancient events which were, by their nature, quite hard to confirm. The press corps should have challenged them hard, trying to get at their credibility. And guess what? Had the corps done that, we would have learned that these rough, scary, untested men were telling a load of strange tales.

Thomas Jefferson, who particularly appreciated the value of high-quality political journalism to the health of democracy, would have really liked the Daily Howler.  And if Jefferson had been alive in the second half of the last century, he really would have invented the Internet.