The CBS / big media initial response:
"I know that this story is true. I believe that the witnesses and the documents are authentic. We wouldn't have gone to air if they would not have been. There isn't going to be -- there's no -- what you're saying apology? . . . Not even discussed, nor should it be. I want to make clear to you, I want to make clear to you if I have not made clear to you, that this story is true, and that more important questions than how we got the story, which is where those who don't like the story like to put the emphasis, the more important question is what are the answers to the questions raised in the story, which I just gave you earlier." Dan Rather, in a CNN interview on 09/10/04/, transcript via the Drudge Report.
"The fear I have is: How do you know who's doing the Web logs?
"And what happens when this stuff gets into the mainstream, and it eventually turns out that the '60 Minutes' documents were perfectly legitimate, but because there's been so much reporting about what's being reported, it has already taken on a life of its own?" - Jeffrey Seglin, a professor at Emerson College in Boston, quoted in theLos Angeles Times
"JUST CAUGHT Jonathan Klein debating Stephen Hayes about the CBS forgery scandal. Klein says that 'Bloggers have no checks and balances . . . [it's] a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas.'" - Instapundit
So far, big media simply throws darts at blogger's reputations rather than engaging in the big debate. William Safire puts a great op-ed in the NY Times warning against this approach:
"What should a responsible news organization do? To shut up sources and impugn the motives of serious critics - from opinionated bloggers to straight journalists - demeans the Murrow tradition. Nor is any angry demand that others prove them wrong acceptable, especially when no original documents are available to prove anything. Years ago, Kurdish friends slipped me amateur film taken of Saddam's poison-gas attack that killed thousands in Halabja. I gave it to Dan Rather, who trusted my word on sources. Despite objections from queasy colleagues, he put it on the air. Hey, Dan: On this, recognize the preponderance of doubt. Call for a panel of old CBS hands and independent editors to re-examine sources and papers. Courage."
Amen. But it was still left to alternative media to start asking the hard questions.
The Evidence for Authentication:
Daily Kos points out that the memo could concievably have been reproduced on an IBM Selectric or possibly an Executive:
"To to sum up, the original document expert the "forgery" brigades were quoting checked the document typeface with Interpol, and now believes that these documents were consistent with an IBM Selectric Composer; that the Air Force had indeed purchased such devices as early as 1969; and that typeheads were indeed available with the 'th' keys in question. (I will further point out that it appears any IBM typeface available for the Selectric was also available for the Executive, but that is a likely irrelevant detail.)"
See the details here and here.
Basically, they show that: 1) The IBM Selectric Composer had the capability of using the superscript th and a font and spacing close to if not identical to the memo. 2) The IBM Selectric machines had been purchased by the military. 3) Another model, the IBM Executive, had the capability for the font and the superscript, but possibly not the spacing. As to why Killian would've bothered typing his CYA memo-to-self on this machine, the blog links to this post by an expert on typeography and printing presses:
"It's true that some whizbangs took a couple of extra steps. People ask, Why would Killian have gone to the trouble of creating a reduced superscript "th"? But we're talking about the early 1970s here. Let's be frank -- in those dear departed times, real men did not touch typewriters. Trust me on this. It's highly probable Killian scribbled a note and gave it to one of the office "girls" to type up for his signature. The office "girls" hardly ever bothered about putting their initials on such documents, in spite of what the secretarial practice books said. But the "girl" would have typed the document very nicely."
I would've been convinced that it was possible, except for some very coherent responses.
The most persuasive is from The Shape of Days:
"The machine sold for anywhere from $3,600 to $4,400, and fonts were extra and not cheap. . . . I'm talking about $3,600 to $4,400 in unadjusted 1973 dollars here. If you use one of the widely available deflation or purchasing-power calculators, you end up with an equivalent in 2004 dollars of between about $16,000 and about $22,000. . . .
(NOTE: The Shape of Days has Gerry Kaplan, who runs the website ibmcomposer.org, attempt to duplicate the memo. Go see the site, it's worth it. Shape of Days commentary continues:)
". . . pretty darned close to the original. But not close enough. The letterforms in the IBM's Press Roman typeface are very close to the letterforms in the CBS memo. Not surprising, since they're both based on the original Times New Roman font commissioned by the Times of London in 1931. But as we've seen already, different versions of the same font always exhibit subtle differences, usually in letterspacing. This case is no different. . . . Hey, what about that superscript? How'd he make it? I asked him via e-mail, and he replied:
"To make the superscripted th, I first typed "111", then switched the font to the 8pt font, switched the escapement lever to the smaller escapement (horizontal movement), reverse indexed the paper 1/2 line up, typed the "th", indexed 1/2 line down, switched the escapement lever to the wider escapement, then changed the type ball back to the 11pt font. . . ."
. . . when Gerry says he switched to the 8-point font, he's not talking about pushing a button. He had to remove the 11-point type ball from the machine and replace it with the 8-point type ball, which in a real office would involve digging in the back of a drawer to find the seldom-used thing. Creating that superscript wasn't quick or easy, and when he did it the carrier slipped and the superscript ended up offset. Unlike the perfectly formed and placed superscripts seen in the CBS memos. . . .
Another point that is very suspicious is the centered heading. This is a snap to do with fixed spacing (like courier), but the text is centered using proportional spaced text, which means that the typist had to carefully measure the text prior to typing to calculate its exact center point. . . . Each of those lines of type had to be centered by measuring it carefully, doing some math, then advancing the carrier to just the right point on the page. The margin for error would be pretty wide because type can be off by a few points in either direction and still look pretty well centered. It wouldn't be objectionable unless you went looking for it. So it wasn't necessary for Lt. Col. Killian — or his typist — to be millimeter-precise. And yet … he was. Two letterheads typed three months apart can be superimposed on each other so perfectly that no difference at all can be seen. It's the same deal as before: the red in front was superimposed over the black behind it. You just can't see the black copy because the red copy is perfectly aligned with it. These letterheads weren't centered to within a couple of points of each other. They were centered exactly the same. Three months apart. Remarkable."
Links on the Powerline lead to The Washington Post, only a few days behind the blogosphere, reporting that there are problems with CBS's attempts to authenticate the memos:
"The lead expert retained by CBS News to examine disputed memos from President Bush's former squadron commander in the National Guard said yesterday that he examined only the late officer's signature and made no attempt to authenticate the documents themselves. 'There's no way that I, as a document expert, can authenticate them," Marcel Matley said in a telephone interview from San Francisco. The main reason, he said, is that they are "copies" that are "far removed" from the originals.'" . . .
"'I am personally 100 percent sure that they are fake,' said Joseph M. Newcomer, author of several books on Windows programming, who worked on electronic typesetting techniques in the early 1970s. Newcomer said he had produced virtually exact replicas of the CBS documents using Microsoft Word formatting and the Times New Roman font.
Newcomer drew an analogy with an art expert trying to determine whether a painting of unknown provenance was painted by Leonardo Da Vinci. 'If I was looking for a Da Vinci, I would look for characteristic brush strokes," he said. "If I found something that was painted with a modern synthetic brush, I would know that I have a forgery.'" . . .
"An ex-Guard commander, retired Col. Bobby W. Hodges, whom CBS originally cited as a key source in authenticating its documents, pointed to discrepancies in military abbreviations as evidence that the CBS memos are forgeries. The Guard, he said, never used the abbreviation "grp" for "group" or "OETR" for an officer evaluation review, as in the CBS documents. The correct terminology, he said, is "gp" and "OER."". . .
"CBS News produced a new expert, Bill Glennon, an information technology consultant. He said that IBM electric typewriters in use in 1972 could produce superscripts and proportional spacing similar to those used in the disputed documents. Any argument to the contrary is "an out-and-out lie," Glennon said in a telephone interview. But Glennon said he is not a document expert, could not vouch for the memos' authenticity and only examined them online because CBS did not give him copies when asked to visit the network's offices. "
The upshot? Everyone is now fairly sure they were a forgery. One of the op-ed contributors of the Daily Iowan believes that it is a Republican forgery promulgated by Bush to divert attention from his war record.
The blogosphere has come in ahead of the mainstream media in both content and speed, with the incredibly elaborate posts on both sides of the issue putting CBS's lame denial to shame. Come on, if Kos can put up a very coherent defense, why can't a multi-billion dollar corporation manage to do the same? Beldarblog points out that most of the "big league" blogger's credentials are actually quite impressive:
"Hugh Hewitt's understated bio on his blog reveals that he is "the host of a nationally syndicated radio show heard in more than 60 cities nationwide, and a Professor of Law at Chapman University Law School, where he teaches Constitutional Law," and that he "is a weekly columnist for The Daily Standard, the online edition of The Weekly Standard, and a weekly columnist for WorldNetDaily.com." . . .
John H. Hinderaker, "Hindrocket" of Power Line, is affiliated with the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Policy and is a partner in the Minneapolis law firm Faegre & Benson. His practice history includes "twenty-six years [in] a broad-based and varied commercial litigation practice. A veteran of more than 80 jury trials, he has appeared in courts in fifteen states." J.D. cum laude from Harvard; A.B. magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Dartmouth — yeah, I think I've heard of those schools. . . .
Scott Johnson, Power Line's "Big Trunk," is also affiliated with Claremont, and probably doesn't wear pajamas to his day job as "an attorney and senior vice president of TCF National Bank in Minneapolis." Power Line's "Deacon" is Paul E. Mirengoff, a partner in the Washington office of mega-firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld (where his partners include uber-Dems Bob Strauss and Vernon Jordan). In addition to government service in the Office of the General Counsel of the EEOC, his credential include an undergraduate degree, summa cum laude, in 1971 from Dartmouth College, and a J.D. in 1974 from Stanford Law School, where he served on the Stanford Law Review.
The Godfather of law bloggers, of course, is the InstaPundit himself, Glenn Reynolds. Again, his blog bio is pretty modest, but if you dig a bit deeper, you'll find that Glenn Harlan Reynolds is the Beauchamp Brogan Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Tennessee College of Law. (Endowed professorships are a very big deal, even for a full professor at any law school.) His legal and popular-press publications list is a mile long — the top-tier law reviews in which he's published scholarly articles include Columbia, Virginia, Penn, and Wisconsin — and he has a BA from Tennessee in 1982 and a JD from Yale Law School in 1985."
It just goes on from there.
And pajama jokes abound.
"They should have asked Professor Bainbridge to provide some adult supervision. Send those guys some pajamas!" Instapundit
"Actually, I'm in sweatpants and a tanktop. But of course, it doesn't matter a jot what a fact-checker is wearing as long as his facts are correct. CBS's apparently aren't." Andrew Sullivan
"We promise to be fully clothed for our appearances tonight, but I can't vouch for the Freeper." Powerline
"Now if they change it "sitting around in Bra and Panties." some of us.....errrrr I mean some you may be in trouble." Left Coast Conservative
James LileksAnd finally, The Truth Laid Bear, Amy and Jammie Nation suggest the blogosphere start a line of blogging jammies:
"We donate the proceeds to some worthy cause; perhaps Spirit of America, Operation Give, or the latest Strengthen the Good cause, under the banner of the CBS News 'We got our asses kicked by guys in pajamas' Fund."
Hmm. Give me a nice little set of cotton tank tops and shorts, and I'm soo there.
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