Everyone has heard the old saying, "Rome wasn't built in a day." Well, Rome didn't fall in a day, either. Centuries of discussion among scholars, laying waste to entire forests in pursuit of printed debate, still haven't pinpointed an exact date for Rome's last gasp. Perhaps the Roman Empire "fell" when Rome was sacked by the Visigoths in 410 AD, or it might have happened when the last Roman-born Emperor, Romulus Augustus, was kicked off the throne by the German warlord Odoacer in 476 AD. Maybe the fall of Rome began in 286 AD, when the Emperor Diocletian split the Empire into East and West. At no point, however, did citizens of the Empire wake up, look at their calendars, and say, "Ye gods; it's the Dark Ages!" People living through turning points of history have rarely been able to see them for what they were at the time. It has mostly taken a backward look to discover the historical significance of this or that occurrence. Until recently, only hindsight could tell us which events were the hinge points of history.

When historians look back on the year 2004, they will identify 9 September as one of those hinge points. This year will be identified as one marking the fall of the Mainstream Media Empire. Not only did the producers of CBS' venerable 60 Minutes allow Dan Rather to base an attack piece against President Bush on forged 1972 memos, but they ignored the concerns of the experts they hired to "vet" them. Emily Will, one of those experts, said, "I found five significant differences in the questioned handwriting, and I found problems with the printing itself as to whether it could have been produced by a typewriter." She sent an email to producer Mary Mapes -- who refused to interview Bush's old roommate on the grounds that he was "pretty pro-Bush -- urging that the documents not be used. Oddly enough, the email probably looked more like it was written on a 1970's typewriter than the documents she had been checking. Other document examiners expressed doubts as to their authenticity. Yet CBS not only used them, they steadfastly refused to admit that anything was wrong with them for nearly a week. Even then, Dan Rather tried to deflect the growing controversy over the forgeries. "This is not about me," Rather said. "I recognize that those who didn't want the information out and tried to discredit the story are trying to make it about me, and I accept that." If it's a forged document (no one seems to have the courage to ask Rather), how can it be considered "information?" What kind of "news" story depends on false documentation?

Within hours of Dan Rather using the memos (described as "newly found" instead of the more accurate "newly created") in an effort to "prove" that President Bush disobeyed direct orders and needed his record "sugar coated," those documents were exposed as fraudulent by bloggers. Blogs like Powerlineblog.com and LittleGreenFootballs.com, following up a suggestion in a comment on FreeRepublic.com, began collecting evidence that the memos in question could not be authentic. Not only do they violate nearly every procedure and custom regarding military memos, but they couldn't possibly have been created using 1972 technology without a great deal of effort and expense. Moreover, writing and keeping such memos would never have occurred to Lt. Colonel Jerry Killian, and the officer whom he purportedly accused of putting pressure on him to smooth over the Bush record, Colonel Walter "Buck" Staudt, retired 18 months before the memo was supposedly written. Furthermore, the odds of precisely duplicating the page and line formatting of Microsoft Word using the 2002 version of the Times New Roman font dwarfs the chances of getting struck by lightning while simultaneously winning the lottery. Perhaps the best appraisal of the documents came from infamous forger-turned-forgery-expert Frank Abagnale, played by Leonardo DiCaprio in the 2002 Steven Spielberg movie "Catch Me If You Can." In an email to FOX News Channel's Neil Cavuto, Abagnale wrote, "If my forgeries looked as bad as the CBS documents, it would have been, 'Catch Me In Two Days.' "

Before the Internet became a major source of information exchange, the mere fact that CBS vetted the documents would have overwhelmed any question as to their authenticity, for months at least, if not years. In their zeal to smear President Bush with the election drawing near, 60 Minutes producers -- and perhaps Rather himself -- must have counted on that. The mainstream media had that kind of unquestioned power and authority for decades, and power does indeed corrupt. CBS executives are still stonewalling, perhaps thinking that a few people sitting at home typing on their computers in their pajamas (as Jonathan Klein, a former executive vice president of CBS News referred to bloggers) aren't worth worrying about. There are probably people thinking it's a good idea to sit tight and weather Hurricane Ivan, too.

When the Founding Fathers of this country ensured freedom of the press, they never imagined that Big Media would set itself up as the gatekeeper of information -- deciding what news to report and how to slant it, using its power to influence the nation's voters. There is no way to forgive this breach of the public trust. We have depended on the press to inform us in a candid and unbiased way for so long that the habit's hard to break, even when they lose their impartiality and become obvious tools of the Democrats. Since the Vietnam War and Watergate, the so-called "mainstream" media has been little more than a doleful Greek chorus for the pessimistic Left. The Internet, however, represents the ultimate free market of ideas -- instead of days or weeks, new information is transmitted and vetted almost instantaneously, directly by the consumer. Sites that do their homework will only keep readers as long as they continue to do so, because of aggressive competition. A hundred years ago, most newspapers were small, independent publications. Competing for the public eye kept them honest -- good reporting increases readership. Within a decade, we'll be in the same situation with regard to Internet-based news. Whether you call it Rathergate, Memogate, or prefer to ignore it, this foray into partisan-driven fakery by CBS is the media equivalent of splitting the Roman Empire.

Only this time, there won't be a thousand years of darkness.