Tag: CBS

Typewriters and “Fake” Documents, Oh My Part 3

More on the CBS documents whose authenticity is being questioned. More troubling aspects to this case.

First, CBS produced the documents but refuses to say where they got the documents from — so the documents have zero provenance.

Second, Jerry Killian’s son, Gary Killian, said the documents did not come from Killian’s family or personal papers and that he believes at least one of the documents is clearly a fake.

Finally, CNS has an excellent roundup of interviews with font experts doubting the authenticity of the CBS documents.

“It was highly out of the ordinary for an organization, even the Air Force, to have proportional-spaced fonts for someone to work with,” said Allan Haley, director of words and letters at Agfa Monotype in Wilmington, Mass. “I’m suspect in that I did work for the U.S. Army as late as the late 1980s and early 1990s and the Army was still using [fixed-pitch typeface] Courier.”

The typography experts couldn’t pinpoint the exact font used in the documents. They also couldn’t definitively conclude that the documents were either forged using a current computer program or were the work of a high-end typewriter or word processor in the early 1970s.

But the use of the superscript “th” in one document – “111th F.I.S” – gave each expert pause. They said that is an automatic feature found in current versions of Microsoft Word, and it’s not something that was even possible more than 30 years ago.

“That would not be possible on a typewriter or even a word processor at that time,” said John Collins, vice president and chief technology officer at Bitstream Inc., the parent of MyFonts.com.

“It is a very surprising thing to see a letter with that date [May 4, 1972] on it,” and featuring such typography, Collins added. “There’s no question that that is surprising. Does that force you to conclude that it’s a fake? No. But it certainly raises the eyebrows.”

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.)

CBS and ‘The Reagans’

The back-and-forth over CBS’s “The Reagans” drama has been fascinating to watch. Of course in the face of pressure driven by conservatives, CBS decided to move the controversial mini-series to Showtime.

CBS’s statement announcing this is bizarre,

CBS will not broadcast The Reagans on November 16 and 18. This decision is based solely on our reaction to seeing the final film, not the controversy that erupted around a draft of the script.

It’s amusing to see how a major media outlet, when faced when its own scandal, spins as poorly as any politician out there. The decision had nothing to do with the outcry over the film? That’s about as believable as a CBS story about destroying weapons bunkers in Iraq.

Although the mini-series features impressive production values and acting performances, and although the producers have sources to verify each scene in the script, we believe it does not present a balanced portrayal of the Reagans for CBS and its audience. Subsequent edits that we considered did not address those concerns.

As far as I can tell, CBS is simply flat-out lying about their sourcing claims. As Patty Davis, who in the past has had less than flattering things to say about her famous family, notes in Time magazine,

In the New York Times on October 21st, one of the writers admitted that the line about AIDS victims was completely fabricated. In that same article, Jim Rutenberg reported that the producers claimed no major event was depicted without two confirming sources.

In fact, Davis cites numerous errors related to their depiction of her life in the film (emphasis added),

Nor do I remember conducting an impromptu yoga class at my wedding reception. (I promise you, no one at my wedding was chanting Om or Shanti.)

. . .

Consider the scene in a girlsÂ’ boarding school I supposedly was attending when my father was elected governor of California (I was never at an all-girlsÂ’ boarding school.) They have a classmate saying to me, “HitlerÂ’s just been elected governor.” No one writes a line like that with any other agenda except to wound.

But nothing beats the third paragraph of the CBS explanation of the switch to Showtime for “The Reagans,”

A free broadcast network, available to all over the public airwaves, has different standards than media the public must pay to view. We do, however, recognize and respect the filmmakers’ right to have their voice heard and their film seen. As such, we have reached an agreement to license the exhibition rights for the film to Showtime, a subscriber-based, pay-cable network. We believe this is a solution that benefits everyone involved.

Ah, I get it now — it’s okay to make absurdly bogus biographical films of people provided you show them on a pay-cable channel. How about a new slogan: Showtime — for the times when integrity is a liability!

Source:

‘The Reagans,’ From One of Them. Patti Davis, Time, November 3, 2003.

What Happened to the Real Dan Rather?

First, Dan Rather and CBS News got blasted by conservatives for ignoring the Chandra Levy story. Now USA Today reports that Rather apparently created another mini-controversy by (gasp!) suggesting on the air that the issues surrounding the use of embryonic stem cells was so complex, that viewers should pick up a newspaper or magazine to get more complete coverage of the controversy than television or radio could manage.

What’s next — will news anchors go so far as to urge people to read a book?(crappy World War II nostalgia by Tom Brokaw doesn’t count)