Marvin Kalb, now teaching minds filled with mush at Harvard to become journalists in his mold , interviews Dan Rather ...

KALB (questioning Rather about the Bill Burkett, forged documents story) : Every now and then it even looks as if the new media is at war with the old media. I want to go back to the National Guard story of last year. I've always been astonished that even before the program ended -- it was still on -- a blog site called FreeRepublic.com run by an active Air Force officer blasted the program. Four hours later another website called Buckhead ran a detailed critique of the documents that you used in the report. What happened, then, was that dozens of other bloggers joined in, then the mainstream media joined in, and then everything shifted and the focus was on you! The focus was not on the substance of your story. --

RATHER: My principal -- I wouldn't say "crime;" my principal problem -- was that I stuck by the story. I stuck by our people for too long. I'm guilty of that. I believed in the story. The facts of the story were correct [sic]. One supporting pillar of the story, albeit an important one, but one supporting pillar was brought into question. To this day no one has proven whether it was what it purported to be or not. I stuck to the story because I believed in it. He stuck with his people. I didn't give up on my people.

KALB: You just said that, um, (pause) you think the story is "accurate."

RATHER: Well, the story is "accurate."

I was wrong when I said, "Marvin Kalb and these guys just don't get it." They get it. "Forged documents? So what? Whatever we say is, is. So if we put these documents out, even though they are forged, that say Bush was AWOL from the National Guard, he was AWOL from the National Guard, because we say it," and he's incredulous here that these blogs would challenge this, and he's amazed that they were able to take the focus of the story off of the "substance" of the story, which was that Bush was AWOL from the Guard, proven by forged documents, and make Rather the substance. (Laughing.) It's an alternative world out there. Not only do they create an alternative reality that they package as news every day, they live in it!