Rathergate and Postmodernism

Frederick Turner derives a philosophical lesson from 'Rathergate' ("The Blogosphere and the Pajamaheddin"):

For the last thirty years or so academic Humanities departments throughout the country had been teaching writing through the discipline of rhetoric, based on deconstructive theories of the indeterminacy and self-destructiveness of any text. Since words can only be defined by other words, and cannot refer outside the language world to self-sufficient present realities, the only valid speech or writing was that which persuades others, and enacts the power interests of the discourse-community with the highest political ideals. The concept of truth, of the "transcendental signified," had been parsed into absurdity: everything depended on what the meaning of is is, as our former President so ingeniously put it.

Journalists in the mainstream media had imbibed these ideas with their education, and had melded them with the enthusiasm and hero-worship they had lavished on the intrepid reporters of the Watergate and Iran-Contra scandals. But in the process, fact-checking, critical editing, and sound research had all begun to erode. . . .

The new tone that entered the blogosphere was a sense of responsibility to the truth. The bloggers looked around themselves and saw that nobody else had the powerful means, the democratic and distributed organization, the robust egalitarian truculence, and the absence of interest conflict to act as the truth's final guardian and court of appeal. The mainstream journalists had abdicated their responsibility, the political parties were obviously willing to bend the truth, the academy had philosophically repudiated the concept of truth, the courts were increasing based on adversarial rhetorical virtuosity, rather than the establishment of fact. So it was up to the bloggers.