On the trail of the lonesome Pein

Corey Pein offers a defense of his recent article in The Columbia Journalism Review, revealingly entitled "Blog-Gate."

If you've somehow managed to miss the biggest commotion to hit the blogosphere since Six Apart announced it was buying Live Journal earlier this week, Pein's CJR piece has sparked a massive irestorm—particularly among those who worked so feverishly last summer to uncover the machinations behind the 60 Minutes report. In simplest terms, Pein contends that—since they failed to answer every question regarding the provenance of the National Guard memos—the bloggers are as deep in the muck as CBS is in the mire.

Here's the CJR article's key graf:

Consider the memos in question. They were supposed to have been written by Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Killian, now dead, who supervised Bush in the Guard. We know Killian’s name was on them. We don’t know whether the memos were forged, authentic, or some combination thereof. Indeed, they could be fake but accurate, as Killian’s secretary, Marian Carr Knox, told CBS on September 15. We don’t know through what process they wound up in the possession of a former Guardsman, Bill Burkett, who gave them to the star CBS producer Mary Mapes. Who really wrote them? Theories abound: The Kerry campaign created the documents. CBS’s source forged them. Karl Rove planted them. They were real. Some of them were real. They were recreations of real documents. The bottom line, which credible document examiners concede, is that copies cannot be authenticated either way with absolute certainty. The memos that were circulated online were digitized, scanned, faxed, and copied who knows how many times from an unknown original source. We know less about this story than we think we do, and less than we printed, broadcast, and posted.

That we don't know everything about the memos, however, doesn't mean we know nothing about them. And just because we're not all document experts doesn't mean we're unqualified to come to reasonable conclusions about their authenticity or lack thereof.

Pein disingenuously notes in his subsequent letter to Jim Romenesko, "I’m not going to pretend to be qualified to peer review Hailey’s work." Well, yes, who beyond a very select universe of document experts is? But that doesn't mean mere mortals like ourselves can't make a judgment about Hailey's qualifications and opinions.

"Having erected an insurmountable burden of proof, Pein then goes about trashing anyone who dared reach a conclusion about the memos," writes Jonathan V. Last in The Weekly Standard. And trash away he does: Paul Boley, Harry MacDougald (and their fellow Freepers), Joesph Newcomer, Danny James, Joe Allbaugh, John Scribner, George Conn, Maurice Udell, Dean Roome, Joe Scarborough, Ann Curry, Chris Weinkopf, Peggy Noonan, Power Line, Little Green Footballs, James Taranto, Meryl Yourish … well, you get the idea.

They're all wrong about the memos. Only Pein and a handful of CBS stalwarts are right.

Not only that, the bloggers were wrong to speak up about the memos' doubtful authenticity, at least until they could prove, unequivocally, the documents were forgeries. They should have kept a respectful silence, like folks at the Columbia Journalism School, and let CBS get away with its shabby reporting. But they didn't, as Hindrocket at Power Line explains:

The bloggers … began questioning the documents within hours after they appeared; raised many logical questions about their authenticity, the vast majority of which turned out to be valid; pointed out anachronisms within the documents that proved that their contents were false; and were ultimately proved correct in their suspicion that the documents were fakes. Nearly all of which occurred, not over a period of years, which CBS had to pursue its "story," but over the space of twelve hours.

And the Columbia Journalism Review thinks it is the bloggers who are blameworthy in this story.

Pein defends himself in his letter to Romenesko by claiming that his critics (Power Line and The Weekly Standard excepted) obviously haven't read his article—and, in any case, are in no position to be "100 percent sure" of the memos' origin. He also claims (not very convincingly in my view) that he came to the story with assumption that the blogosphere's conclusions were true and was persuaded otherwise by the evidence:

I began my reporting with the presumption that the documents were forged. Only after weeks of research and reporting did I reach my conclusion—not that the memos are real, but that there is no definitive evidence in the blogs or in the press that supports the conventional wisdom that they are forged. We simply don’t know from the incomplete evidence that’s before us.

And, really, what does any of us know with real certitude? Am I a blogger dreaming I am a journalist or a journalist dreaming I am a blogger?

"The prestigious Columbia Graduate School of Journalism," writes Mickey Kaus in Slate, "could use this meandering, weak piece—which fails to deliver the goods in support of whatever its vaguely delineated thesis is—as a case study of an article that desperately needs editing before it's published. … Oh, wait. The piece was published. By the prestigious Columbia Graduate School of Journalism."

But hold on a sec, Mickey. Can you really be sure?

UPDATE: Hindrocket reports at Power Line that the Thornburgh/Boccardi report is due out tomorrow. He's not optimistic that it will settle many questions, though. I worked for Thornburgh back in the late 70s, and I know him as a person of enormous personal integrity. Back in the day, he was quite the fearless prosecutor as well. But I do have to wonder whether—without an army of attorneys at his command—he's been able to shed much light on Rathergate. We'll know soon enough.