Tag: CBS

Dan Rather and CBS’ Hypocrisy Over Internet Analysis of Apparently Fake Documents

From Dan Rather’s defense of the Killian documents last night,

Document and handwriting examiner marcel matley analyzed the documents for CBS news.

He says he believes they are real…but is concerned about exactly what is being examined by some of the people questioning the documents….

Because detioration occurs each time a document is reproduced…..

And the documents being analyzed outside of cbs have

Been photocopied, faxed, scanned and downloaded…. And are far removed from the documents cbs started with.

But then the New York Times reports,

Mr. Matley said the documents the network sent him were so deteriorated from copying that it was impossible to identify the typeface.

So apparently CBS is concerned about people trying to authenticate poorly copied and deteriorated documents only when it’s someone other than their expert.

And an odd puzzle remains. If this document came from Killian’s personal file, as CBS claims, how did it end up being copied repeatedly to get into such an advanced stage of deterioriation?

If the Pajamas Do Not Fit, The Documents are Bull—-

Last night the Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes debated former CBS producer Jonathan Klein about whether or not the CBS documents are fake. Here’s a partial transcript,

KLEIN: Yes, I mean, I have a lot of faith in the producer of this segment only because I worked with her for a long time. And she is absolutely peerless, I’d say, in the profession. She is a crack journalist. And in this case, she’s the same producer who broke the Abu Ghraib story.

And at the time, there was a big flurry of, you know, a lot of attempts to discredit that story. And it turned out to be even bigger than the story they originally broke.

But in this case, she’s worked on this story for four years. I mean, this is a multiple Emmy winning producer…

SNOW: But if you’ve worked on this for four years, you’re thinking, you know, I’ve got something here. And if you worked for four years, you’re going to want to make it work. Again, in talking to Gary Killian — one of the things he said in this conversation with her is I’ve got the names of some people who can directly contradict this, who have worked with my father. They were his superiors. They knew the president. And she said I don’t know, you know, I’ve got to find out if they’re Bush supporters. Again, is that the kind of question you’d really ask when you’re doing something like this?

KLEIN: Oh, it speaks to the care that they take to validate sources of all kinds. They’re not going to just throw somebody on the air just because they say something. It’s a real integral part of the “60 Minutes” process. They are probably the most careful news organization, certainly on television.

SNOW: No…

KLEIN: When it comes to the vetting sources.

SNOW: …but they put Ben Barnes on the air. And he’s working for John Kerry.

KLEIN: But they disclose things. You know, they disclose stuff like that. And they vet people’s veracity. And they have multiple checks and balances in the process to make sure that not too much slips by.

Now they’re human. They could make mistakes, but it’s not going to be by forgetting to call the sources that the…

SNOW: Because the point on CBS — “60 Minutes” got burned by a forged document case in the late 1990’s and ended up having to pay some money for it. It was the border patrol.

KLEIN: Well, their track record over 35 years is just about pristine. They have the best record of just about anybody.

Of course, this morning one of the sources cited by CBS — Retired Maj. General Hodges — is claiming that CBS misled him about the new documents and adds that he thinks they are fakes,

Retired Maj. General Hodges, Killian’s supervisor at the Grd, tells ABC News that he feels CBS misled him about the documents they uncovered. According to Hodges, CBS told him the documents were “handwritten” and after CBS read him excerpts he said, “well if he wrote them that’s what he felt.”

Hodges also said he did not see the documents in the 70’s and he cannot authenticate the documents or the contents. His personal belief is that the documents have been “computer generated” and are a “fraud”.

Not surprisingly, the only thing Klein offered were ad hominems like this,

KLEIN: (UNINTELLIGIBLE) and these loggers have no checks and balances and couldn’t — I agree. It’s an important moment because you couldn’t have a starker contrast between the multiple layers of checks and balances and a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing…

I’ll take someone sitting in his living room just writing over producers who deceive the people they’re turning to for verification anyday.

It’s also interesting that according to Killian’s son, CBS interviewed both him and his mother prior on Friday, but of course chose not to include any portion of that interview in their coverage of the controversy over the documents.

CBS Falls on Face

Wow — Dan Rather’s response tonight was pathetic and completely nonresponsive.

Were typewriters with superscript available in the 1960s? Yes, but as you could clear see from the photographs CBS used that there was a major difference between the pseudo-superscript that typewriters of the era used and the sort of superscript that Word and other modern word processors can do (and that are featured in the apparently fake documents).

Was the Times Roman font available since the early 20th century? Yes, but the real issue is was it available on typewriters that could do proportional spacing and superscripting in the 1960s? It is telling that Rather didn’t cite a single example of a typewriter so equipped.

Rather slammed the blogosophere and others for relying on scans of PDFs that CBS itself posted. Is this serious? Then make the originals available to other media outlets for independent analyses. Only supplying scans in PDFs and then complaining that critics are only relying on scans in PDFs is typical major media bullshit.

Finally, Rather concluded by saying he knew of no evidence that would suggest the documents were fake, once again conveniently ignoring Killian’s widow and son’s contention that they believe the documents are fake.

This is not going away and CBS just dug itself a deeper hole with such a shoddy response.

BTW, here’s a screen capture of CBS’ segment which shows the obvious problem with the superscript claim. CBS expects you to ignore the evidence and believe these two forms of superscript are identical. Find a typewriter from before 1973 that can do the sort of superscript that is show on the left “New document” and CBS might have something. But so far, there’s nothing here suggesting the documents are authentic.

Updated:

Note that Dan Rather is actually claiming that the two superscripts above are the same!

Critics claim typewriters didn’t have that ability in the 1970s. But some models did. In fact, other Bush military records already released by the White House itself show the same superscript – including one from 1968.

How stupid do they think we are?

CBS Maintains Documents Are Authentic

CBS continues to maintain the documents it showed on Wednesday about Bush’s military service are authentic. But they still have yet to give any evidence of why we should accept it as authentic. The best they have is this,

At this time, however, CBS News states with absolute certainty that the ability to produce the “th” superscript mentioned in reports about the documents did exist on typewriters as early as 1968, and in fact is in President Bush’s official military records released by the White House.

Yawn. The problem is that all of the superscripted “th” combinations that people have been pointing out in authentic records are in monotype fonts and they are not true superscripts. Rather than extending above the tops of the characters as the superscripted “th” seen in the apparently forged documents, these “th” combos are 3/4 of the font size tall and simply leave a bit of white space between the bottom of the superscript and the line to give the appearance of being raised. They don’t extend above the tops of the normal characters and aren’t in proportionally spaced fonts, much less in Times Roman.

Apparently Dan Rather is going to address the forgery claims on tonight’s CBS News broadcast.

Typewriters and “Fake” Documents, Oh My Part 2

Earlier I pointed out an error by an individual claiming documents purportedly written by George W. Bush’s former Texas Air National Guard superior Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian were fake. The author of that page apparently got a lot of negative e-mail and is not happy about it. Well, then don’t write articles where your sole claim is “some guy e-mailed me saying there were no typewriters that could do proportional spacing.” It turns out there were 7 or 8 different models that could do so.

Little Green Footballs has a much more compelling case for claiming the documents are forgeries. Charles over there opened up a new Word document and simply typed in the text of the memo. Surprise, surprise, surprise, doing so creates a document that, when printed, is identical to the memo that CBS is touting.

INDCJournal.Com talked to an expert on fonts who told him that since the font on the typewriter is proportional, given the time period there are only a small number of fonts it could be and the font in the document doesn’t appear to match any of those fonts. The kicker is that some of the numbers appear to be in the same font that Word defaults to in the Little Green Footballs experiment — Times New Roman. Times New Roman, of course, is a font that didn’t exist until very recently.

SpaceTownUSA.Com repeated the Little Green Footballs experiment with another of the documents and found the same thing. Either the document is a forgery or this typewriter from the 1970s had the uncanny ability to spit out memos that are almost identical to what Word turns out in its defaults using Times New Roman today.

So are the documents fake? Who knows? Weirder things have happened than this, so it’s certainly possible this is all some weird coincidence. But there is something that should give anyone pause. CBS featured someone who looked at the documents and declared them consistent with other documents known to be authentic, but as far as I can tell neither CBS nor its authenticator saw the original documents. All CBS has, apparently, is copies of the documents which is troubling. So to begin with these are not official documents, but rather documents allegedly pulled from the personal files. Second, the person who allegedly wrote them died years ago so he cannot testify to their veracity. Finally, all we have to base their authenticity are copies rather than the originals.

At the very least, CBS should give more details on how it went about authenticating the documents and have its authenticator address the font issue.

Typewriters and “Fake” Documents, Oh My

This page casts doubt on a document related to George W. Bush’s National Guard service because, according to the author, it appears to have been typed on a modern typewriter. But the page has a lot of disinformation about typewriters.

For example, it is claimed that,

A couple of Kerry Spot readers explain that the memo linked above is “proportionally spaced,” meaning a thin letter like an “i” or an “l” takes less space than an “n” or an “m”. Apparently proportional spacing was impossible on typewriters during this period.

Huh? IBM began selling typewriters with proportional spacing in the 1940s, including its Electromatic which was very popular with government agencies (the document in question was written by an individual with the Texas Air National Guard.)