Campaign '04: BLUE TRUTH, RED TRUTH

Which world did you watch last week?

Do you live in the world where President Bush, whose bold wartime leadership has made America safer, survived an ambush from that liberal lion Dan Rather, who tried to swing the race with a bunch of phony documents trashing Bush's National Guard service, only to have the charges blow up in his face?

Or do you live in the world where Rather, the Tiffany network's honored heir to Walter Cronkite, spoke truth to power, made a true if perhaps flawed case that Bush shirked his duty more than 30 years ago, and is by implication unfit to serve as Commander in Chief today?

Red Truth holds that Rather has at last taken his place alongside other disgraced liberal icons, who have recklessly disregarded the standards of journalism to try to bring this President down. Blue Truth sees Rathergate as a sideshow; the problem with the mainstream media is not that they are biased but that they are lazy and have given Bush a free pass from the start. Red Truth looks at Bush and sees a savior; Blue Truth sees a zealot who must be stopped. In both worlds there are no accidents, only conspiracies, and facts have value only to the extent that they support the Truth.

This is where we live now, and where the final battles of this campaign will be fought. Anyone can carry a weapon. The traditional heralds compete with the authors and bloggers and filmmakers and cable barkers and radio rabble-rousers who appeal to those who tailor the news to fit their political niche. Campaign-finance reform has changed the channels through which the money moves, restricting fund raising by the candidates but filling the war chests of allied guerrillas. Above all, the stakes of the outcome seem to change the rules. If you believe that your children's safety depends on the right guy winning, what tactics can possibly be out of bounds, and what scruples--political or intellectual or legal or journalistic--are more important than ultimate victory?

DELIGHTED BUSH BACKERS COULD ONLY savor the satisfaction that of all the media titans it was Dan Rather who had been humbled: he who had famously tangled with Bush's father during the 1988 campaign, had ingratiatingly interviewed Saddam Hussein during the walk-up to the war and had been the featured speaker at a 2001 Texas Democratic fund raiser (even if he did apologize later), and whom his colleague Andy Rooney describes as "transparently liberal." Within hours of the 60 Minutes broadcast Sept. 8, skeptical bloggers were spitting challenges to the authenticity of the CBS documents on Internet sites like freerepublic.com and powerlineblog.com No typewriter in 1972, the Netizens argued, could have produced those papers, which alleged that Bush violated orders to take a physical and that his superiors were pressed to "sugarcoat" his evaluation.

Though many mainstream papers ran CBS's charges essentially unchallenged on their front pages the next morning, their reporters were also catching the blowback from the bloggers. By day's end Fox News, the A.P. and ABC News had called the CBS story into question. Before long White House spokesman Scott McClellan would suggest that the documents might have been leaked by Democrats, and California Republican Congressman Christopher Cox was calling for an investigation.