Actually it was the first time 'ELITES' discovered it was difficult to lie and get away with it'...
Since ELITES were the 'gatekeepers', AND made the rules, they and their friends have gotten away with lying... almost ...forever. Including Dan Rather.
For me, what is so “special” about the Dan Rather case is that he tried to fight a new war with old weapons.
The infamous broadcast happened on a Wednesday. By Thursday we had all vetted all the proof that they were created in word. We discussed everything from kerning to precise character spacing, and someone even created an animated Gif showing that a new word version overlaid perfectly over the fake document. I even remember noticing that the superscript on my computer didn’t match the document and I was told in a thread here to print it out and it would. I did and it did.
So by Friday, we knew, WITHOUT A SHADOW OF A DOUBT, that they were fake, and then Dan came on to the nightly news to discuss the document. He forgot he was in the internet age and doubled down. He actually showed an old document, made with a professional word processor from back in the day, that had superscript, “proving” the doc was authentic.
That argument would have worked in the past because, though many people would have been throwing a shoe at the TV, that would have been the end of it. But in the age of the internet we were able to discuss, in public, all over the world, the fact that his claim was a red herring. Not only did it still not address the lions share of evidence (we’d moved way off of the superscript issue by then), but it ignored the fact that it had nothing to do with the type of typewriter used in government offices in that day.
It was comical, and his goose was good and cooked.
And if it had happened in 1990 he would have gotten away with it.