Hey Dan, you’re busted, dude!

I think we can safely say that it is now official; the blogosphere has officially joined the ranks of the new media. As Drudge broke the Monica Lewinsky story and catapulted the Internet into the forefront of journalism, so has the Rathergate story pushed the web logs into the limelight while humiliating one of the major network news organizations.

CBS and Dan Rather have spent more than a week claiming the story is true even if the documents are false, a reporting style most recently used by Comical Ali as he ducked falling plaster in Baghdad while denying there were any Americans near the city.

Using tactics akin to the swarming tactics proposed by Tofflerian military theorists, the blogosphere rapidly developed literally dozens of bits of information from experts on typography, word processing and even military nomenclature that showed the memos in question were undoubtedly fraudulent in nature.

This information was used by the mainstream media to illustrate how CBS and Dan Rather ignored any pretense to journalistic integrity in their campaign to discredit the President and influence the upcoming national elections.

Throughout the ensuing clamor, the story of President Bush’s TANG service faded into the background as the focus of the story became CBS’ and Dan Rather’s defense of a story based on the now discredited memos and the discovery that the former Texas politician is presently a fundraiser for the Kerry campaign.

The blogosphere, like the Internet that spawned it, is huge and composed of people from every walk of life in every time zone. The rapid response of numerous bloggers with excellent credentials to this story illustrates how the grip of mainstream media on news has now been conclusively broken.

The days of Walter Cronkite ending a broadcast with, “and that’s the way it is,” are gone. No longer can a mainstream news outlet rest the authenticity of a story on the gravitas of the talking head who tells it. CBS News and Dan Rather have had their reputations shredded with this story.

In the last day or two the blogosphere has published the contact information for CBS outlets, Viacom stockholders and CBS News advertisers. I expect their e-mailboxes will be overflowing, their fax machines running out of paper and their snail-mail carriers to be groaning under the weight of the protests about CBS News and Dan Rather.

Short of a public on-air apology by Mr. Rather, I would expect Viacom to soon be putting tremendous pressure on him to resign as their stock price drops and sponsors drop CBS News to avoid losing market share.

Pajama-clad or not, experts or not, bloggers have served an important role in exposing an attempted manipulation of public sentiment of a scale not seen since the days of William Randolph Hearst. Hey Dan, you’re busted, dude!