Good summary of Rathergate

The New York Daily News summarizes Dan's downfall very succinctly.

Having outsourced its ethics and all responsibility for accountability, Rather & Co. pretended it was business as usual during the final six weeks of the campaign.

In one sense, it was. Even as the network planned an election-eve hit on Bush's management of the war in Iraq, its ratings continued to fall. Mired in a distant third place in a three-network race, it was sometimes outdrawn by Fox cable.

Powerline also summarizes what this means for the blogosphere (as quoted by USA Today):

Said John Hinderaker, a Minneapolis lawyer and co-author of Power Line (powerlineblog.com): "I wouldn't say I feel vindicated. I never felt we were in need of vindication. But now that the episode is pretty much behind us, I think it's been a tribute to the power of the medium: the Internet."

The bloggers, starting just hours after the 60 Minutes report, raised doubts about the Guard documents. They questioned, for example, whether the papers could have been produced on a 1970s-era typewriter. "Within a matter of hours, millions of people had seen that information," Hinderaker said. "The biggest newspaper with the biggest resources and the biggest budget could not have done what we did that day."

I hope to post a more complete summary of Rathergate and all of the 2004 election outrages soon.