J$P Instant Transcript! Scott W Johnson of Powerline

From Special Report with Brit Hume, September 14, 2004:

VIDEO OF JONATHAN KLEIN [FORMER CBS NEWS EXECUTIVE]: It's an important moment, you couldn't have a starker contrast between the multiple layers of checks and balances, and a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas, writing what he thinks.

BRIT HUME [FOX NEWS]: That is a moment from The O'Reilly Factor, Tony Snow hosting the other night, in which a former CBS News executive is being critical of those people who run their own websites, or logs, with names like Instapundit, Little Green Footballs, and Powerline, and where they say whatever they please, and post whatever responses and links to other such websites they choose. These web loggers, or bloggers as they are called, are the ones who first sent up the alarm about those memos Dan Rather reported on 60 Minutes II last week. The rest, as they say, is history. So who are these guys, and how do they operate, women too? For answers we turn to one of them, Scott Johnson, sponsor of the Powerline blog, which he does in Minneapolis. Mr Johnson, welcome; tell me about how you go about your work for the Powerline blog every day.

SCOTT JOHNSON [POWERLINE]: Brit, I do pretty much what you described. I get up early in the morning and take a look around at news and politics sites around the internet, try to find items that are of interest, and apply some analysis to them and share them with our readers.

HUME: Now, you are described as you heard there by that former CBS Executive Mr Klein as being guys in their living rooms in their pajamas. Is that a fair characterization at times?

JOHNSON: Well, whenever they let me out of the living room I try to put on a coat and tie, Brit. I think it's not a fair characterization. There are many of us, like the three of us who write for Powerline, who are professional folks who do serious things for a living.

HUME: Well what do you do, what is your profession?

JOHNSON: I've been practicing law for 25 years, and also teach law school here in Minneapolis once a week.

HUME: So when did you get started doing this?

JOHNSON: Well, I've been writing with former law partner John Hinderaker articles for newspapers and magazines over the previous ten years before we started Powerline between 1992 and 2002. We started the site over Memorial Day weekend in 2002, really with 9/11 in mind, wanting to cover events related to the war and political items related to the war, without the kind of lag time that's involved in submitting 750-word columns to editors and waiting to hear if they're of interest to them. So we appreciated the freedom that a site on the web afforded us and the ability to pursue our interests at liesure.

HUME: Let me ask you about this particular story, about which you and other webloggers have made what appears to be a clear difference. What got you, describe what happened. You're home, you're watching CBS News, what's going on, what happened?

JOHNSON: You know what happened is I read in the Boston Globe early in the week that the Kerry campaign was rolling out a theme called Operation Fortunte Son, to run a kind of round three of attacks on President Bush's Air National Guard service. So I started following the stories related to that in the Globe. The Globe had one on Wednesday which I linked to and wrote about on Powerline. And then on Thursday I read the Globe story about the 60 Minutes report that had been on the television the night before; I hadn't seen it. But I followed the Globe story to the 60 Minutes site, read the 60 Minutes story, and looked at the memos at the 60 Minutes site. And it struck me that the memos were an incredibly convenient fit with this announced Kerry campaign theme of last week. And I wrote a little bit about that on our site, but before I posted it I looked at the email that we had received that morning, and we had in fact received an email from a reader who suggested that the documents bore the earmarks of computer-generated word processing rather than typewritten documents. And I posted that together with the links to the CBS story and the Boston Globe story, thinking--

HUME: So you just put this stuff up on your site, just like posting notices on a bulletin board?

JOHNSON: That's exactly right. I put that up at 7:50 am and left for work. And I thought that gee, you know, if that's mistaken I'll hear from a few readers who will set us right, and I'll post that information. And if we're right, we'll hear from a few readers who will supply some additional information and we'll post that. But by the time I got to work, we had 50 emails from experts of all kind around the country, supplying additional information, and we kept updating our posts with that information through the day.

HUME: So what do you say to those like Mr Klein and other who say, look, you guys are just out there, you're independent actors, you don't have editors, you don't have checks and balances, you don't have the layers, as you heard Mr Klein describe it, of verification. And so you can't be trusted. What do you say to that?

JOHNSON: You know, I think it's a little bit funny to hear that in this context, where CBS has now, according to your guest of last Friday, worked on a story for four years and produced these four documents that are just obvious forgeries. You know, Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs recreated that critical August 18th memo in a few minutes on the default settings of his Microsoft Word word processing system after he read the post on our site.

HUME: Right.

JOHNSON: He posted that on his site so we could all take a look. By 10:30 those documents looked like a joke, and yet now here's CBS five days later, still in the middle of a Watergate-style stonewall. It's just incredible.

HUME: Well, but let me go back to this question. Clearly CBS has stubbed its toe here, but what about the charge that you guys are not subject to verification? How do you answer that, and is there indeed a form of verification in the response you get?

JOHNSON: Well, I think that's exactly right. The only people, the only reason we have serious readers of the kind who engage with us on our site is that we have a track record for the past two-and-a-half years of putting up information with links that readers can check out for themselves. And when we occasionally make mistakes, we instantaneously post corrections. There's no lumbering process of days and weeks where people are arguing with us. If we make a mistake, we post information, we let readers take a look for themselves. That's what we have to offer, is to act as an honest broker of information. I think that's what we did in this case.

HUME: Well, it certainly is clear that you and the people at Little Green Footballs and other websites as well were factors in this equation. Mr Johnson, thank you very much for taking the time. Very interesting story you told us.

JOHNSON: Thanks for having me, Brit.