AFTER 60 Minutes II broadcast its fraudulent story on President Bush’s Air National Guard service on September 8, 2004 holy heck broke loose on the Internet. Virtually anyone with eyes to see the evidence that accumulated during the days after the report came to the conclusion that the documents on which the story was based were fraudulent; yet CBS stonewalled for 12 days before admitting that its story was, well, problematic.

Perhaps no event was more instrumental to CBS’s undoing than the movement of the inquiry into the fraud from the Internet to the mainstream media in general, and in particular to the Washington Post‘s Mike Allen (in a September 10 story he reported with Michael Dobbs) and Howard Kurtz (in a series of stories he reported with Allen and Dobbs, including this September 11 piece).