Memogate

Before having read the article, "After Blogs Got Hits, CBS Got a Black Eye", I had never heard of the 2004 scandal referenced as "Memogate". The only memogate I had heard of referenced an issue in President Obama's term, and this article referenced President Bush, so I looked into what had happened on the episode of 60 Minutes and how CBS handled the issue.

I found out that the mentioned memos were about George W. Bush's military service, because apparently there were suspicions that he had failed to complete all his service with the National Guard. This was a very prevalent issue at the time because it was the year of the 2004 election that Bush was running in and would ultimately win.

CBS producer Mary Mapes obtained the memos from a Lt. Col. and was told that they were copies of original documents that belonged to Bush's superior officer. The memo stated that Killian, Bush's superior officer, was being told by higher-ups to sugarcoat Bush's performance in the Guard and that he did not want to do that.

Mapes interviewed people that she felt would be able to state whether or not the documents were real, and though she states that they told her they were valid, when interviewed later they stated that she had not given them all the facts about the documents. All of the experts that Mapes had look at the documents were either unsure or unconvinced of their validity.

It seems to me that Mapes was so happy to have gotten what seemed to her like an open shut piece of evidence for a story that she had been working on for years, she ran with it instead of making sure it was totally valid. Though this happened on a broadcast segment, it happens more and more today because so many outlets want to get their story out first in the day of the Internet. Everything can be posted at lightning speed, and every major outlet wants to get the word out first, but we have to be careful to still fact check and do good journalism. Which is ironic, because in this article it was the mainstream media that messed up, but a mainstream media man is quoted saying that bloggers are the ones that don't have credibility: "These bloggers have no checks and balances, you couldn't have a starker contrast between the multiple layers of check and balances and a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing."