E.G.

Leiter is again saying that it is uninteresting that forged documents were used by CBS to support the case that Bush was a crappy National Guard soldier.  Here’s how he puts the point this time:

One illustrative example of the degraded state of public discourse in America–and of the venal contribution of the blogosphere to this state of affairs–was last year’s "Rathergate" fantasy, in which "courageous" (read:  trivial and right-wing) bloggers exposed a tree (a document of dubious authenticity), and missed the forest (there is ample evidence that Bush dodged Vietnam service; Rather’s error pales by comparison to real journalistic misinformation and careless reporting, of the kind that led to the Iraq war). 

We should all grant Leiter’s point that the press is capable of deceptions much worse than the one in which CBS engaged by using the inauthentic Killian memos, but I think this particular deception is still interesting. 

As Leiter and many, many others have stressed, it is probably true that Bush was not a good soldier.  But prior to the election, many people did not believe this.  (I suppose they still don’t, but it no longer matters much.)  To get them to change their minds, the opposition needed to present them with evidence to the contrary.  The Killian memos were supposed to be part of that evidence.  When the Killian memos were shown to be fakes, this only reinforced the belief (which, incidentally, was and is widely held on both the left and the right) that the media engages in deceptive, politically-motivated reporting.  In the lead-up to the election, people relied on this belief to help them to justify ignoring evidence which put their political favorites in a bad light.  So, by using a demonstrably inauthentic document to support the view that Bush was a bad soldier, CBS made it much easier for people to distrust the media — and therefore made it easier for people to go on acting as though they believed Bush was a good soldier, despite copious evidence to the contrary.