Dan Rather and his pals at CBS say they were “misled.” Significantly, however, they haven’t yet told us precisely how and by whom they were misled. And the impression grows that they didn’t ask the hard question of their sources because, well, they didn’t want to.

The real story is that there was apparently nobody else at CBS who was willing to pull the plug. Producer Mary Mapes reportedly had been working on the story for five years. If a story doesn’t come together in five years, it’s usually a good idea for a news organization to, shall we say, move on. CBS may never recover from the blow.

The bigger story is that the commanding heights of American public opinion – the press, academia and Hollywood – are increasingly vulnerable to attack. In the case of the press, new technology – cable, the Internet, talk radio, etc. – has rendered obsolete the ideological monopoly of the left. Sooner or later the same thing is likely to happen to academia and the limousine liberals in the entertainment industry.

A proliferation of conservative think tanks has provided roosting places for those who can’t get past the left-wing tenure screen within academia, for example. And while the left may still thrill to the messages of Robert Redford, Barbra Streisand, and Michael Moore, Hollywood has also produced Ronald Reagan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Mel Gibson. Practically ever since the premiere of “Fahrenheit 9/11,” in fact, President Bush’s poll numbers have been going up.

What appears to be going on is that the left, once the home of genuine populism, has been losing touch with the American people and retreating into an elitist shell. Virtually every poll has long shown that reporters in the national press are well to the left of the public on nearly every major social, economic, and political issue.

A famous survey of 139 Washington, D.C., bureau chiefs and correspondents after the 1992 election found that 89% had voted for Bill Clinton – the sort of election return you used to hear about from the Soviet Union.

Even ABC’s Peter Jennings was forced to make the grudging but telling observation, on “Larry King Live” a few years ago, that “I think yes, on occasion there is a liberal instinct in the media which we need to keep our eye on, if you will.”

The public editor of the New York Times, which sets the tone for much of the rest of the press, several months ago penned a scorching column conceding that the Times’ left-wing views had slopped over into its news coverage, at least on social issues – though that was hardly news to most of us out in the heartland.

And viewers of CBS and the other traditional networks may have noticed the same thing, which could be one reason CBS lost 50% of its viewers between 1981 and 2001, as recounted in a timely new book, “Weapons of Mass Distortion: The Coming Meltdown of the Liberal Media,” by conservative press critic L. Brent Bozell III.

Mr. Bozell argues that Senator Clinton’s invention of a “vast right-wing conspiracy” was actually a pre-emptive strike designed to scare the press into hewing to the liberal line.

What the Rather episode shows is that insofar as there is a conspiracy, it’s a vast left-wing conspiracy – and like most conspiracies, it’s coming unraveled. For Democrats, it couldn’t have come at a worse time: just as they were hoping to make inroads on the character issue.

Was it just coincidental that their “Fortunate Son” advertisements began to appear just after the “60 Minutes” hit-job? Perhaps, but then this is the same Dan Rather who was forced to apologize once again after being caught in 2001 delivering the main speech at a Democratic fundraiser in Austin, Texas.

The good news is that the American people long ago learned to discount what the big news industry tells them. Republicans won six of the nine last presidential elections, and Mr. Clinton, the first two-term Democrat since Franklin Roosevelt, only won re-election after signing on to such conservative ideas as welfare reform.

So maybe the real message to the Dan Rathers of the world is this: You don’t count.

Mr. Bray is a Detroit News columnist.