CBS and the media more broadly:

Mickey Kaus quotes a reader who makes an excellent point — last week, “Sandy Genelius, a network spokeswoman, said, ‘We are confident about the chain of custody; we’re confident in how we secured the documents'” (I’m quoting the Sept. 14 New York Times). But “[h]ow could they be confident of the chain of custody if, as appears, they never even spoke” to the National Guardsman from whom Burkett claims he got the documents (he now says he got them from some other source that he won’t disclose)?

They might have had good reason to go with documents that they thought were properly authenticated (that’s a strange thing to think here, but I still assume they did originally think it), even if the chain of custody — the evidence of how they got from the files to CBS — was bad. (I say “might.”) But it seems just wrong, and knowingly wrong, to say that they “are confident about the chain of custody” in a situation like this.

On the other hand, who knows? Maybe the New York Times misquoted Genelius. What can one say after the failings of the media (perhaps the inevitable failings of any human institution) have been proven to one so often, at so many levels?

That’s what’s so sad: Surely the aggregate of Rathergate, the Jayson Blair scandal, the chronic misreporting about assault weapons, or any other individual incident, and everything else we’ve seen over the last several years — often thanks to the media criticism of blogging (a medium that thrives on media criticism) — has opened our eyes to just how little one can trust what one sees in the news media.

And yet no matter how skeptical one tries to be, one can’t double-check everything. We have to trust outside sources. But the same sources that claim to be so trustworthy are, it turns out, often untrustworthy, sometimes in huge ways (falling for outright frauds) but also often in many small ways (media bias, whether political, social, or personal, that repeatedly leads to erroneous and misleading information).

I suspect this has been true all along — it’s just that we can’t ignore it any more. We have to learn to live with a world of extraordinarily imperfect information. And that’s a lot more work than assuming that the media (or at least certain media) is highly accurate.