MuD & PHuD

Well, take a look at this CBS story. Take a look at it. What actually happened here? What actually happened here is that one of the time-honored, greatest institutions of highest repute in the history of media attempted to pass off a fraudulent story attacking a sitting president for the purpose of dooming his reelection in the middle of a campaign using forged documents. And look what happened. Ordinary people, sitting at home, with computers, were able to deduce in two hours that CBS was perpetrating a fraud on the American people. This would not have happened 16 years ago, it would not have happened 30 years ago.
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You want to go into TV news, that's where you want to end up. These are the best of the best, and look what happened, ordinary Americans, using average, ordinary, everyday American products, a computer, a telephone line, American written software, have brought down one of the most powerful and unassailable institutions in the history of American media. And don't think they haven't been brought down. And they haven't yet, they're in the process. They've been cut down. Now, this is a classic illustration of what I mean. And this is not to criticize the bloggers by calling them ordinary Americans. I'm merely using this as a comparative term. To me, remember, the ordinary American is a person who makes the country work. The ordinary American you never hear of, who is by definition anonymous because nobody can know everybody. Here's who's making the country work. And look who brings down the great Tiffany network, CBS. It wasn't other news networks who doubted this. They're late to the chase. It wasn't CBS that brought themselves down in an effort to save themselves and get the story right. Nope, they were prepared to perpetuate the fraud. "The documents were true before they were forged, but they're still accurate," is the CBS line today.

And, of course, in the midst of all this, the same thing that's happening to the bloggers today is the same thing that happened to me 16 years ago. The bloggers, ah, you can't take these people, they don't have any checks and balances, they don't have any editors, they can say whatever they want, there's no guarantee of honesty. This is what the people at CBS say. This are the people that perpetrated the fraud criticizing the ordinary Americans who caught 'em. The ordinary Americans who caught 'em are there because they have been informed, attuned, sensitized to the operating techniques of CBS over the years.
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This little blogger story here can illustrate to every other ordinary American what is possible against these big, powerful, supposedly unassailable institutions, so big and powerful, nobody could get close to them, so big and powerful, they can't be defeated, they can only be stopped occasionally, it's not true. Ordinary Americans. And ordinary Americans have dragged, slowly but surely, other big institutions to the truth. The big institutions were the last to arrive at the truth, and some of them to this moment are still not there.