Burnt Orange Report

Rathergate, a response

By Nathan Nance

Guest post by Nate Nance

A commenter asked where was the BOR reaction to the Rathergate firings that happened this week in my Tuesday's with Tucker Carlson post. I can't speak for all teh writers here at Burnt Orange, but I can say this, I didn't really have much of an interest in it.

I know, what's wrong with me that I don't care about this huge story? Well, it's not that huge of a story. CBS wasn't ready to air the story because they were still in the dark about the memos origins and some people got fired for not doing their jobs. It has nothing to do with whether the memos were fake or not. We know Bush did not complete his time as he was supposed to in the Guard. The one eyewitness that has stepped forward to say he saw Bush doing drills in his "missing year" said he saw him in Texas when Bush says he was in Alabama training. The one piece of documentary evidence that proves he was in Alabama are dental X-Rays from January 1973, two months after he was suppossed to have reported back to Houston. The memos aren't even a key piece of the puzzle.

Like I said, not an important story. I believed that until I read this Newsweek piece by Howard Fineman. The point is, the old order, the mainstream media, is dying and the new order, the blogosphere, is set to take its place. But the establishment press won't go quietly and the "Blogger Nation" is still dependent upon the mainstream press. If either is to perpetuate, I think we'll see a new hybrid, a mix of the mainstream press and the bloggers. It would be mutually beneficial in a lot of ways, and I think we are already seeing that in the popularity of cable news shows (cable was the forerunner of the Internet) and the merging between cable and the blogosphere in blogs like Hardblogger and Bloggerman. Granted, the merging of those two would be a lot easier than say a newspaper and a blog, but it's an experiment that seems to work.

I say down with the old order, hello new news paradigm. I'll be watching and blogging the revolution, as always.

Guest post from Nathan Nance. Nate is a sports/news clerk at the Waco Tribune-Herald and writer/editor of Common Sense a Texas-based Democratic Web log. He can be reached at nate_nance@yahoo.com.