While you have to take opinion columns a little bit more differently than you would a straight news article, I'm a bit peeved by this item in Wednesday's Newsday by Danny Schechter. Michele at ASV posted about it this morning, and I take just as much offense to it as she does.

In the piece, Schecter claims that the whole flap around "memogate" or whatever we're calling it this half hour was only begun after a PR firm got involved and was pitching the story to people, even though most people have said that it was after they read something that a poster, "Buckhead," on a Free Republic thread had written about it. Is this to say that there is no independent-think going on, and that people who had knowledge of typewriting could not have investigated this on their own? Do people really think that while Bush's Air National Guard service may still be in question, and has been overshadowed by this story at CBS, that the media going live with something that may be falsified isn't a story? Yes, that's his point - but is it wrong for them to do so? Hell, even if it was some sort of setup by whomever Schechter believes it is, it's all part of the same story.

Is Schechter so blind to think that only "the rabid conservative grapevine and amen corner" picked this up and ran with it? While I hate injecting myself into a story such as this, I'm going to do so in order to prove a point. I consider myself one who covers "the media" - whatever that term may be. If it looks like something is fishy with a report done on a news program, I'm going to cover it. I don't care about which people from which side of the political spectrum are pushing it, I do my best to weed that out and figure out what the real story is - as a journalist, Schechter should believe that there are people out there who have the same skillsets he claims to have - the bullshit alarm. This smelled really really bad from the moment I heard about it - in turn, I picked pu on it a little bit. At the same time, I will happily point out that I am a registered Democrat who votes on his conscience and with whatever candidate(s) I believe will do the best job. Am I a "rabid conservative" or part of the "amen corner?" Heck, no. Stories are stories. Did this particular story "overshadow" questions that people have about the President's service in the National Guard? Sure it did. But in no way, shape, or form did any of the bloggers Michele mentioned in her post take the "pitch" from a PR firm and run with it following any lawyer's "leadership." Hell, the firm, Creative Response Concepts wrote in their Press Room that "the bloggers, and then CNS www.cnsnews.com [CRC's client], were moving this story, which we then began pushing to conservative media, news websites and "mainstream" press." Many of the bloggers who were hot and heavy on this story are those that Schechter would claim are on the "conservative grapevine" - which is true - but as far as I can tell, exactly zero of them claim to have been "led along" or having recieved a pitch from CRC on this story.

Obviously I can't disagree that those who have more conservative beliefs investigated this quite a bit - that's their "job" as bloggers of that persuasion. But to say that no one picked this up who thought it was a news story is just absurd. Until there's a media "watchdog" who isn't just trying to point out what people on the other side of the fence are saying that's bad, arguments and columns like this will appear. Just my two cents.