Blog Scandals

Bloggers are responsible for some of the largest political scandals of our time. A few of these scandles are:

1. '''The Trent Lott scandal. '''

*Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott gave a speech at Senator Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday party in which he stated that he wished Thurmond won his 1948 presidential campaign. While this seemed like a harmless comment, Thurmond had run for president on a segregationist platform, and bloggers advanced the idea that Lott was thus praising segregation. The mainstream media only covered this story after bloggers made a lot of noise about it. This eventually led Trent Lott to resign as the Senate Majority Leader.


 * '"I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either," Lott said at the party.

For context, see this 2002 CNN Article on Lott's apology.

2. The 2004 Dan Rather scandal.

*In 2004 cable news anchor Dan Rather ran a story stating that President George W. Bush had skipped out on active duty in the Air National Guard in order to go to business school. The report claimed that his father, President George H. W. Bush, pulled strings for him in order to get him off the hook for duty. The report was based mostly on documents that were later shown to be fabricated. Also, President George W. Bush was only 20 at the time, and his father was not in office, so the "pulling of the strings" claims were not timed correctly. Rather aired the story without fully fact checking the information he was disseminating and this ultimately cost him his job.

These are a few examples of why bloggers are referred to as "The Fifth Estate"