The liberal media apologists at Columbia Journalism Review took time from their tofu and watercress sandwiches and decaf soy lattes to look down their noses at the blogosphere for exposing Memogate.

Corey Pein’s article, “Blog-gate,” states that CBS “screwed up badly in Memogate — but so did those who covered the affair.” For all of Pein’s indignation, little is aimed at Dan Rather and The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight. The article is quite the contrary, as if this whole situation is the fault of the blogosphere, not the idiots at the Tiffany Network who didn’t do their homework.

Right off the bat, it is obvious what tone Pein is going to take:

Bloggers have claimed the attack on CBS News as their Boston Tea Party, a triumph of the democratic rabble over the lazy elites of the MSM (that’s mainstream media to you). But on close examination the scene looks less like a victory for democracy than a case of mob rule.

“Mob rule”. At least Pein didn’t call us “jihadists” like Tom Brokaw or said we have tiny genitals like Minnesota Star Tribune columnist Nick Coleman. “Mob rule” is a crime. Rwanda genocide is “mob rule”. For a group that screeches about the First Amendment at every perceived threat to it, it appears there is such a thing to CJR as too much free speech.

Anyway, I’m not here to sulk over name-calling. Let’s look at Pein’s piece. The author argues that the blogosphere’s “mob rule” consisted of bad fact checking, and the MSM was wrong for following their lead and piling on CBS.

First, much of the bloggers’ vaunted fact-checking was seriously warped. Their driving assumptions were often drawn from flawed information or based on faulty logic. Personal attacks passed for analysis. Second, and worse, the reviled MSM often followed the bloggers’ lead. As mainstream media critics of CBS piled on, rumors shaped the news and conventions of sourcing and skepticism fell by the wayside.

Wait a minute … seriously warped fact checking, and the MSM blindly following the lead like sheep … is Pein talking about Bombgate?

The premise of the article lumps the incredibly diverse conservative lobe of the blogosphere into one bloc. Sure, there are irresponsible blogs out there, and I do not agree with every piece of evidence that has crossed my path. I, for one, do not believe that cBS cooked Memogate up hand in hand with the Kerry campaign. Also, I do not put much credence in the Word duplications of the Killian memos — you can accurately duplicate just about anything on Word.

But other evidence is harder to ignore, and it isn’t all contained in the Killian memos. Burkett’s admission to Rather that he lied about the source of the documents taints his credibility. The network’s ignoring of experts who questioned the documents’ authenticity is a red flag. Ignoring comments from Killian’s friends and family is another. Ignoring credible sources the network deemed too “pro Bush” is yet another.The backgrounds of the CBS employees who assembled this story is yet another. The network’s stonewalling is yet another.

RatherBiased does a good job of taking down Pein’s criticism of how blogs dissected the memos’ authenticity.

Ultimately, we don’t know enough to justify the conventional wisdom: that the documents were “apparently bogus” (as Howard Kurtz put it, reporting on Dan Rather’s resignation) and that a major news network was an accomplice to political slander.

It would help if the network released its investigation after four months. As I have compared here before, four months is plenty of time to take down the goofs behind one story.

Pein then turns to questioning the credibility of the bloggers by calling them “conservative”, which as you know is the MSM’s branding phrase for “out of the norm.” Pein apparently thinks Mapes’ liberal leanings are not relevant, our leanings taint our credibility. This site is among many that Pein labels as GOP operatives incognito:

One of the story’s top blogs, Rathergate.com, is registered to a firm run by Richard Viguerie, the legendary conservative fund-raiser.

To correct the record, Mike Krempasky works for Viguerie’s firm and only had his name handy when he registered the site, but has long since transferred it to his name. However, he had not changed the title in the registry.

But even if the site were still registered to Viguerie, so what? I’ve never met the guy, and likely never will. I’ve never talked to him. I take marching orders from no one. ABC, and therefore ABC News, is owned by Disney, where a former liberal Democratic senator is CEO. I have yet to hear Pein gripe about the journalistic independence of Peter Jennings. All media agencies are owned by people who vote one way or the other. This is merely a cheap shot by Pein.

Pein also comments on how the evil mob intimidated CBS affiliates and Utah State professor David Hailey, whose discredited research concluded that the memos could have been typed.

Hailey wasn’t the only one to feel the business end of a blog-mob. The head of one CBS affiliate said he received 5,000 e-mail complaints after the 60 Minutes II story, only 300 of which were from his viewing area.

I do not support any invasions of Hailey’s privacy, or getting him in trouble at work. But I’m crying rivers over the “blog mob” flooding CBS affiliates with e-mails. Like many liberal journalists, Pein confuses the American tradition of dissent with a lynch mob. Who cares where angry people hang their hats?

I wonder if Pein calls the e-mail campaign against Sinclair Broadcasting a “blog mob”. I’d guess he’d call liberal railing against a conservative organization good old-fashioned grassroots democracy in action.

But where Pein’s arrogance shines is in a double standard for background checking. The article dismisses scrutiny into Mapes’ and Burkett’s pasts, but states the media have not dug deep enough into friends of Bush who may have helped polish his military image.

As Memogate progressed, certain talking points became conventional wisdom. Among them, that CBS’s producer, Mary Mapes, was a liberal stooge; that her source, Bill Burkett, was a lefty moonbat with an ax to grind. Both surely wanted to nail a story that Bush got preferential treatment in the National Guard.

Looking into people’s backgrounds is a bad thing? Just a few paragraphs ago, he accused Krempasky and me of being conservative stooges because this site was once registered to some GOP mucky-muck.

Again, Pein reflects the liberal media viewpoint that any background checks of left-of-center people constitutes an invasion of privacy. This blog and many others have raised numerous and legitimate points about Mapes’ past. Her former co-workers and her own estranged father have said she was trouble waiting to happen.

Mapes’ past is relevant, especially because something similar once happened to her. A story of hers that fit her liberal pre-conceived notions (excessive police force in a shooting) was discredited because of a questionable source — her star witness found out what happened at the scene from a Seattle newspaper reporter, who also noted at the trial that Mapes’ source was “reeking of alcohol” at the time.

Rather called Burkett “an unimpeachable source” at the beginning of the broadcast. That was a rather saintly title that anyone with a modicum of investigative talent would have looked into. We proved he was not.

But Pein takes off the kid gloves for handling Mapes and Burkett, and dons latex gloves when it comes to people who came forward to defend Bush, such as Maurice Udell, Bush’s former commander. Pein said Udell was forced to resign the Air Force in 1985 as a result of a contract fraud investigation.

I’m a journalist — we check backgrounds all the time whenever someone is accused of something. Unless you live in Pein’s world, where scrutiny is reserved for those your editorial board disagrees with.

Pein concludes with the following:

While 2004 brought many stories of greater public import than how George W. Bush spent the Vietnam War, the year brought few of greater consequence for the media than the coverage of Memogate. When the smoke cleared, mainstream journalism’s authority was weakened. But it didn’t have to be that way.

While “Memogate” was a MSM watershed, it was merely a cherry on the top of a bias sundae regarding Vietnam. Kerry never released his records to the press, but they could care less.

Mapes worked on her story for five years, but I have not heard of a single MSM journalist anywhere delivering anything close to that level of scrutiny to Kerry’s records. The MSM’s aggressive investigative energies were expended on discrediting Kerry’s critics, not investigating his service record.

Of course, Pein does not note this, which is the actual story here. Mainstram journalism weakened its own authority through partisanship and stacking newsrooms with left-of-center thinkers to the point of inbreeding. This was going on long before the blogosphere began filling the vacuum.

But I agree with Pein on one vital point. It didn’t have to be that way. But this is the path the MSM chose. If Pein thinks the blogosphere is a monster, that’s Pein’s prerogative. But alternative media is a monster the MSM created.

UPDATE: Charles at Little Green Footballs disputes my argument that anything can be duplicated on Word. To be fair, here’s a link to his site where he tried to duplicate a document from an actual 1970s typewriter.

As I stated in the “comments” section, my point was that it was cBS’ violation of standards more than the actual documents that convinced me that this whole mess was a fraud.