It was a year ago yesterday that one of the groundbreaking events of citizen journalism, the "Rathergate" affair, began. It all started with some postings that Harry MacDougald, a Republican lawyer in Atlanta, made to a conservative web-based discussion forum called Free Republic...
On Sept. 8, 2004, using the pseudonym "Buckhead," MacDougald posted his observations debunking the authenticity of documents which CBS News claimed proved that George Bush Jr. did not fulfill his military service obligations in 1972.
In a Free Republic discussion thread titled "The 'New' CBS Bush documents: Let's do some investigating," comment #46 says:
"You can tell by looking. In a proportionally spaced font, the width of each letter as printed is depends on what the letter is and is not uniform from one letter to another. In a proportionally spaced font like Palatino or Times New Roman, an upper case "W" is much wider than a lower case "i" or "l". In a monospaced typewriter font like courier, all letters are the exact same width. The development of monospaced fonts was necessitated by the technical limitation that typewriters advanced the platen (or the ball in the case of Selectrics) a uniform distance for each character. Monospaced fonts are measured by characters per inch, or cpi, 10, 11 and 12 being the most common in office documents. This measurement is completely useless with proportionally spaced fonts, except as an average. These memos clearly use a proportionally spaced font."
That, my friends and colleagues, was the post which launched a media firestorm -- and which ultimately dislodged longtime anchor Dan Rather and several of his CBS News colleagues. For a good overview of the Rathergate affair, see Columbia Journalism Review, Jan/Feb 2005: "Blog-Gate."
Although many weblogs got involved with covering and expanding this story, I think it's important to note that this flap started with a discussion-forum posting. I think that discussion forums are a fertile ground for much interesting and well-done citizen journalism, although they rarely get the credit for this. It just goes to show that citizen journalism can appear in any kind of publishing, including a public discussion. It's not all about articles. It's about getting the information out.
Excellent point that the whole thing started with a "discussion-forum posting."
Interesting to think about...
Posted by: doug | September 09, 2005 at 09:08 PM
It is also worth reading this open letter to the MSM from a Free Republic poster.
OPEN LETTER TO THE MAIN STREAM MEDIA: We are NOT Amateurs and we are going to kick your butts.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1213567/posts
Posted by: Mike | September 14, 2005 at 03:24 PM
Dan Rather was the only news anchor to ever secure a network broadcast interview with Sadam. I'd hardly call that mainstream media.
Posted by: moonz | October 03, 2005 at 08:01 PM