Glenn Reynolds has lots of links and thoughts. I'm glad that a few heads rolled, but it certainly sounds like many punches were pulled.

This quote by Jeff Jarvis certainly seems appropriate:

I see that the report is calling for more commissions and committees and all that -- which is just the wrong thing to do: It puts yet more distance between the journalists and the public they are supposed to serve. They should be doing just the opposite: tearing down the walls, making journalists responsible for interacting with the public.

This is bigger than Dan Rather. This is bigger than CBS News. This is about the news and the new relationship -- the conversation -- journalism must learn to have with the public, or the public will go have it without them.

Or as Matt Drudge's associate was quoted as saying:

“Because you ignored us,” [Andrew Breitbart] says, “because you ignored Rush and Drudge and God knows who else, we decided to go out and create our media. And I think that what we’re doing is building up something that may be bigger and better.”

Better wouldn't be difficult (at least as far as TV news goes); bigger remains to be seen, but it is about the public having a conversation about the news that's unfettered by big media.

Update: Lorie Byrd of PoliPundit has lots of additional links.

Update: Power Line has a post called "The Thornburgh Report: What It Says, and What It Doesn't Say", that's long but well worth reading. Meanwhile, Hugh Hewitt is calling it "White Wash Report".

In a post called "99 Percent Baloney", Tim Graham of the Media Research Center writes:

Just before I went on MSNBC around 2:45, they showed a clip of Moonves saying "99 percent of the people, and 99 percent of the stories we have are accurate, true, straight down the middle." NO. This and the panel on p. 28 are mistaken to assume that this fiasco is one small deviation from a record of meticulous political balance and utter lack of calculation! This is the must-see--rebut this, Dick and Lou! They shouldn't be pretending to be judges of the entire oeuvre of CBS News content....they only look like lackeys for insisting on CBS's everyday excellence.

Meanwhile, by a strange, strange coincidence, Dan Rather has the night off tonight.

Go figure.

Update: Power Line dissects Mary Mapes' statement about her role in Ra^therGate.

Update: John Hinderaker sums up the RatherGate debacle brilliantly:

Because virtually everyone in the CBS News organization shared Mary Mapes's politics and objective (i.e., the election of John Kerry), skeptical questions were not asked. If there is a single overriding explanation for how a fake story, intended to influence a Presidential election through the use of forged documents, could have been promulgated by 60 Minutes, it is the lack of diversity at CBS News.

For some years now, the party line of the mainstream media has been: of course we're pretty much all Democrats, but that doesn't influence our news coverage. If nothing else, Rathergate should put that defense to rest once and for all.

In a couple of weeks, I will be participating in a conference at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, sponsored by the Kennedy School along with the Harvard Law School and the Shorenstein Center on Press and Politics. The subject will be journalism, blogging, credibility and ethics. Judging from the list of participants, I suspect that most of the discussion may be about how bloggers can become more credible by adopting the standards of mainstream journalists. My own perspective will be a bit different. So far, the blogosphere has a far better record of honesty and accuracy than mainstream organs like the New York Times and CBS. This isn't entirely a matter of personality; it is also a function of the checks and balances of the blogosphere, which are far stronger and more effective than the alleged "checks and balances" of the mainstream media, which, in the absence of political and intellectual diversity, may not operate at all.

I agree.