Rathergate and blogging

*What happened?

September 8, 2004
Dan Rather reported on CBS 60 Minutes that in Lt. Col.Jerry B. Killian reported that Bush failed to obey an order to submit his physical examination and was found unfit for flight status during President Bush's Texas Air National Guard Service in several report.

September 10,
The Washington Post, The New York Times, and other media examined the documents' authenticity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Rather#Killian_documents

Rather claimed that the documents had been authenticated by experts, but CBS reported that the source had misled the network about how he had obtained them.

Rather retired as a CBS News anchor due to this scandal.

*Perspectives

As a news consumer
Rathergate provoked distrust on the media in general. Bloggers were more accurate on information gathering, and the big media somewhat ignored them and degraded their information.

As a journalism student
This is an issue on ethics. As a journalism student, I learned how important ethics is related to the media (of course ethics is important on every issue), and also, I learned the impact of the media on the public sphere. Dan Rather violated ethical issue on this scandal, and as a journalism student, that was a good example not to follow, and never consider as a choice to broadcast.

As a voter
Actually, I'm not a U.S. citizen so I probably cannot feel the same as Americans, but anyway, as a person who live in the United States, I think the Rathergate Scandal is an incident that the media assaulted people who trusted the media as truth.

*Weblog and the media

The media cannot always be fair. It shows balanced perspectives but somewhat subject. It cannot be totally objective. People understand that point, and in my opinion, Weblog is useful in that context. Putting people's own perspectives and opinions, they can share opinions and see the whole picture much more easier by understand or critique others opinions.
By blogging, people can absorb more different viewpoints, and even more unknown information that did not aired. It also can act as fact checkers, and I think, the role of blogger becomes more important for people in the world of technology. It is now the world that people lead the media, not the world that the media lead people.