‘Blogosphere’ mixes truth, fiction

AUSTIN, Texas – Hundreds of thousands of readers know him simply as “Mike,” the creator of rathergate.com, an Internet blog spearheading a petition drive demanding the resignation of CBS News anchor Dan Rather because of his alleged liberal biases.

But what the visitors to his blog did not know when he launched it early last week was that “Mike” is Mike Krempasky, a 29-year-old Republican political operative from suburban Washington, D.C., a detail some might have found relevant.

The conservative bloggers who ignited a frenzy this month over allegations that Rather relied on forged documents in a Sept. 8 “60 Minutes” broadcast questioning President Bush’s Air National Guard service insist they are force-marching the nation’s mainstream media into a new era of transparency and accountability.

They extol the virtues of millions of ordinary citizens using blogs, a kind of personal Internet diary, to collectively check, vet and comment on everything they read in newspapers or watch on TV.

But there’s a catch: Some of the anonymous bloggers aren’t so eager to endure the same scrutiny of their backgrounds and motives.

“Blogs are supremely transparent,” Krempasky said in a telephone interview. “With a very few exceptions, bloggers are real people that can be reached and talked to and held up to the light.”

Nowhere on Krempasky’s site, however, did he disclose that he is the political director for American Target Advertising, a Virginia firm run by Richard Viguerie, the conservative strategist widely credited with inventing political direct mail and helping Ronald Reagan and numerous other Republicans get elected.

By Thursday, after an inquiry from the Chicago Tribune, Krempasky posted a message telling readers who he is, although he insisted his blog is a personal endeavor not connected to his employer.

The episode was hardly isolated.

“Buckhead,” the mysterious blogger on freerepublic.com who was among the first to raise questions about the authenticity of the documents within hours of Rather’s broadcast, declined repeated requests from the Chicago Tribune and other media to reveal his identity.

But on Friday, the Los Angeles Times reported that “Buckhead” is Harry MacDougald, an Atlanta lawyer with ties to conservative Republican causes who helped draft the petition urging the Arkansas Supreme Court to disbar President Bill Clinton after the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

That revelation will likely fuel the suspicions of some Democrats that Republicans were behind a scheme to discredit CBS by supplying the network with fake documents.

If that sounds particularly convoluted, welcome to the “blogosphere,” the chaotic new media world where questionable truths joust with plausible fictions, agendas are often hidden, and motives are frequently mixed, and millions of ordinary citizens clamber to offer their own rumors, opinions and jeremiads. All of which is either very bad or very good for the republic and the future of the American free press, depending on your point of view.

“What worries me most is the fostering of extremism and, sometimes, hatred,” said Cass Sunstein, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School who has written about the “echo chamber” effect of the Internet.

“If left-wing people are just reading left-wing blogs,” Sunstein said, “they will end up thinking that Bush is basically a criminal, which no reasonable view can sustain. Or if people are reading only right-wing blogs, they will think (John) Kerry is a traitor, and there’s no plausible view of that. Millions of Americans are being led to unjustified extremism as a result of paying attention to inaccurate and distorted information.”

Matthew Felling, media director of the Center for Media and Public Affairs, a non-partisan research group in Washington, takes a different view.

“The rise of the bloggers is a reality check for the media elite,” Felling said. “They are fact-checking the mainstream media. Some of them are prejudiced, but a prejudiced source is not necessarily an incorrect source.”

Bloggers insist that the CBS case represents a watershed in the development of their young medium — the moment when several upstart conservative blogs challenged the credibility of one of America’s oldest and most trusted broadcast news networks, and the challenge actually stuck.

The controversy began shortly after Rather aired a report featuring several documents the program said were written in the early 1970s by Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, one of Bush’s commanders during his service as a lieutenant in the Texas Air National Guard.

Bush’s service record has come under scrutiny from Democrats, who charge that he received favorable treatment in the service and skirted some of his obligations. The memos cited by CBS appeared to show Killian resisting pressure from a senior officer to “sugarcoat” Bush’s performance evaluations.

Copies of the documents were released by the White House hours after CBS first reported about them on Sept. 8.

Bloggers, led by “Buckhead,” soon began questioning the authenticity of the documents shown by CBS, asserting that they contained proportionally spaced fonts, superscripts and other typesetting features that were not widely available on typewriters in the early 1970s. Their conclusion: The documents were forgeries, intended to make Bush look bad.

One of the most stinging challenges came from Charles Johnson, a Los Angeles Web designer and musician who hosts a conservative-leaning blog with the name littlegreenfootballs.com.

As questions about the documents ricocheted across the Internet, Johnson set out to perform a simple experiment: He retyped one of the documents on his computer using the default settings in Microsoft Word, then superimposed it atop the image of the document released by CBS. The result was a near-perfect match.

“I downloaded them and opened them up, and I instantly knew this was not anything that had ever been typewritten,” Johnson said. “Then I had the idea to type in my own version. The line spacing, the character spacing, the line breaks, the word wraps — every single thing was an exact duplicate from Microsoft Word in every respect.”

Mainstream newspapers and broadcasters quickly picked up the bloggers’ allegations and consulted forensic document experts, who weighed in with conflicting opinions over whether typewriters of the era could have produced the Killian memos.

By week’s end, even Rather and CBS News, who staunchly defended the “60 Minutes” report, had to concede that questions about the documents needed to be pursued.

Nevertheless, many leading newspaper editors and TV directors are generally disdainful of bloggers, who assume the mantle of the free press but operate outside of traditional journalistic rules that aspire to fairness, balance and rigorous editing and fact-checking. They remain unmoved by the mass e-mail and fax campaigns organized by rathergate.com and other conservative blogs demanding an end to what they consider liberal bias in the news media.

“While some of these individuals are making a serious and thoughtful contribution to our global dialogue, too many simply contribute to the sense that we’re in the midst of an opinion-ridden free-for-all,” New York Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. told an audience at Kansas State University last week.

But that free-for-all is precisely the point, the bloggers reply. In their free marketplace of ideas, they say, good information eventually pushes out bad, and truth ends up trumping falsehood.

“I’ve seen some criticism that bloggers are not edited, and that’s true — we don’t have traditional editors,” said Johnson, the Los Angeles blogger. “But the more important point is that with a readership of several thousand at any moment, if I post something incorrect or debatable, I’ll receive e-mail within minutes. I’ve actually got thousands of editors looking over my shoulder.”