Bill's Notes

The CBS document forgery story is about the Internet's attempting to overthrow television as cultural hegemon. TV has controlled our public debates for decades, co-opting and transforming many of our cultural institutions — education, politics, church, journalism — into entertainment, which is television's own agenda. Television has substituted its own values — the image, the eye-catching, the discontinuous, the repetitive — for the thinking required in the use of the written word.

Internet technology is attempting to overthrow television, and the CBS story is an important early victory. Culturally, the development of the Internet is just in time. The trivialization of our culture and turning all that is sacred, holy and just into fodder for the tube is something that could destroy (and is destroying) our culture. The Internet, by positioning the written word over the image, just may save the day. With the word, comes reason. And if you're a Christian, you believe with the Word comes God.

It was CBS' need for good visuals that helped entangled itself in this mess of forged documents. But you see it posted the documents on the Internet — a word-based medium — and there the story was destroyed.

Thank God. The cultural cavalry has arrived.