Forgery recaps & summaries

More useful posts:

RealClearPolitics Main page links to key news and commentary daily.

RealClearPolitics commentary post from yesterday with summary of sites and their contributions to the story.

Captain's Quarters has a summary post, as well as a moving 9/11 piece above it.

The Kerry Spot on National Review Online MELTDOWN ROUNDUP [09/11 11:57 AM]

HughHewitt.com, today's summary here.

Instapundit's entire output today is worthwhile to bring you up to date. His first summary is here.

Basically, keep reading and following links.

I'm wondering who the forgery's intended victim was. Was it really the President? Or was it a plant to expose main-stream media's (MSM) pro-Kerry bias? If the latter, CBS News did not cover itself in glory. And the NY Times and Boston Globe are getting sullied as well.

Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit posted this yesterday:

UPDATE: James Lileks:

Blogs haven’t toppled old media. The foundations of Old Media were rotten already. The new media came along at the right time. Put it this way: you’ve see films of old buildings detonated by precision demolitionists. First you see the puffs of smoke – then the building just hangs there for a second, even though every column that held it up has been severed. We’ve been living in that second for years, waiting for the next frame. Well, here it is. Roll tape. Down she goes. And when the dust settles we will be right back where we were 100 years ago, with dozens of fiercely competitive media outlets throwing elbows to earn your pennies.

And that will be an improvement. It might not be an improvement over the media that some media folks claim we've had in recent decades, but it will be an improvement over the media that we've actually had.

Well said! Similar sentiments are voiced by Jay Currie at TechCentralStation in "Blogs vs. 60 Minutes"

One day. That was all it took for the ranks of citizen journalists to swarm and then thoroughly discredit a story which ran in the New York Times, the Boston Globe and on a network news magazine. [...]

From the perspective of the establishment media, this, too, is a disaster. CBS will have to explain: where did the documents come from? What were the bona fides of the source? Who was the source? Which expert looked at the documents? How closely?

Those are the starter questions. The more basic question is how could a rabble of bloggers, in one day, provide hard core proof of forgery when major news organizations took those documents at face value? Most fundamental of all, why did the New York Times, the Boston Globe and CBS allow themselves to be used for such a transparent attempt to slander President Bush? Out in the blogosphere there are a swarm of people rooting for the answers.