CBS News anchor Dan Rather probably never thought a few computer nerds would corner him into a surprise spring retirement. But, since a group of Dartmouth alumni "bloggers" uncovered the controversy behind Rather's "60 Minutes" Texas Air National Guard report, Americans are taking notice of a new technological phenomenon crossing generations and spanning the globe.
A recent study conducted by the Pew Internet Survey suggests that eight million Americans keep weblogs -- personal Internet publications ranging in content from daily journals to political commentary. Eleven million others say they read political blogs regularly.
Dartmouth alumni and students are at the heart of the trend. Time Magazine recently named Power Line its blog of the year after they broke the news about flaws in Rather's piece.
In a September "60 Minutes" segment, Rather reported that a never-before-seen 1972 National Guard memorandum showed that President George W. Bush tried to shirk his responsibilities for the Texas National Air Guard. Hours after the story aired, lawyers and conservative political pundits John Hinderaker '71, Scott Johnson '71 and Paul Mirengoff '73 published an entry on their Power Line blog titled "The 61st Minute."
That entry questioned the authenticity of the documents used in Rather's report, and eventually undermined the credibility of CBS News, prompted Rather's unexpected retirement and made Hinderaker, Johnson and Mirengoff some of the most famous bloggers in the nation.
"It took a while to sink in," Hinderaker said. "For me it's still sinking in. But by the end of the day it became obvious that we'd done something pretty important."
Weeks after the controversy raged, CBS issued a statement acknowledging a mistake and conceding that the network could not prove the authenticity of the documents and should not have used them in their report.
Power Line's average traffic of 75,000 to 100,000 hits per day trumps the traffic of the average town newspaper's online edition and even the readership of the conservative Weekly Standard magazine.
But, Hinderaker said he considers the relationship between the mainstream media and bloggers to be symbiotic.
"We rely on the mainstream media in a lot of ways," Hinderaker said. "Clearly you need people paid full time to gather and report news."
Hinderaker said he considers the production and distribution methods of newspapers to be obsolete and expects news to be increasingly disseminated online. He also said bloggers will continue to be instrumental in correcting the mainstream media's errors.
The blogging culture has not just swept alumni. It is changing campus discourse, as well. Economics professor and Rockefeller Center Director Andrew Samwick claimed to be a fan of Power Line. He also keeps his own blog titled "Vox Baby," which he updates daily.
Students are also involved in the trend. Joe Malchow '08 updates his conservative political blog several times daily. Malchow counts talk show host Hugh Hewitt and the Power Line bloggers among the readers of his site at dartblog.com.
Neel Shah '05 joined the blogging community this summer by mocking New York's elite on gawker.com. Shah got the chance to attend the Democratic National Convention to comment on politicians' fashion choices. He wrote an article about starting a fight with Hillary Clinton, which was picked up by the New York Daily News and nearly got him fired from his "real" internship at the New York Observer.
More student blogs can be found at dartlog.net, a group blog set up by staffers of the Dartmouth Review, and dartblogs.com, a site offered by the Review, which provides free blog set-ups to all Dartmouth students.
Later this month, Hinderaker will participate in a symposium at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, organized by Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society and titled "Blogging, Journalism, and Credibility."
"Most of the people they've got participating are old media people, people from The New York Times -- only two or three real bloggers. Seems to be kind of a skewed panel," Hinderaker said.
Samwick would like to see a similar discussion come to Dartmouth. He has tentative plans to invite the Power Line bloggers and liberal political blogger Andrew Sullivan to campus later this year. Hinderaker said he would love to come if invited.
Meanwhile, those who question the credibility of bloggers' online assertions might do well to heed the lesson of the "60 Minutes" incident last September, as traditional media outlets are also occasionally unreliable.
"People are always ringing their hands about the credibility of blogs. To my knowledge no blogger has ever faked documents to influence a political election. I think the mainstream media has more to worry about in terms of credibility than bloggers do," Hinderaker said.
