How One Big-City Newspaper Covered Ra^thergate

GUEST BLOG

Some little time ago I offered a frequent commenter on Winds of Change and sometimes email correspondent of mine the opportunity to guest blog on The Glittering Eye any time he cared to. Now The Glittering Eye proudly presents its first guest blog from AMac. Wow! This is a truly magisterial presentation. I think you’ll agree that AMac is a fabulous writer and engaging thinker.

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It’s easy to take the volume and quality of information that is available on current events for granted. The still-unfolding story of CBS News and the Killian Memos "60 Minutes" segment of Wednesday, Sept. 8 is a case in point. Like many people who read political web-logs, I became aware of suspicions of forgery the day after the broadcast, when Charles Johnson posted his now-famous memo/Word overlay. The likelihood that a National Guard typist would channel what would become Word’s default settings three decades later seemed … low.

As I write this (in Word, using Times New Roman), it¹s been nine days since Johnson’s first demonstration. Here, I’ll present a brief and necessarily incomplete synopsis about what is known as of 9/19/04 about CBS’ conduct, then turn to the weekend’s coverage in my hometown newspaper. The gulf between what a blog-reader “knows” and what a newspaper-reader “knows” is surprising. John Edwards was on to something: there are “Two Americas.” The first can easily become informed on any current-event issue of interest, while the second thinks—mistakenly, in some cases—that it has access to accurate and timely information through the mainstream media.

CBS News’ conduct prior to the 9/8 “60 Minutes”

1. CBS never fact-checked the Killian memos, so they never realized that they contained surprising errors (e.g. the wrong home address for Lt. Bush).
2. CBS never asked people familiar with military correspondence to evaluate the memos, so they never found the many formatting inconsistencies and mistakes that retired Air Force clerks and document specialists have spotted.
3. CBS never asked a qualified expert in typography to check the memos (although two of their other document experts did warn of forgery on typographic grounds).
4. CBS hired handwriting expert Marcel Matley to authenticate Killian’s signature. Matley’s pre-9/8 judgment has never been made public; since the broadcast, Matley has claimed that he cannot authenticate these documents.
5. CBS suppressed the findings of its hired document experts Linda James and Emily Wills when their analyses suggested that the memos were forgeries.
6. CBS hired James J. Pierce as a document expert. His pre-9/8 judgment has never been made public. This weekend, he claimed that his examination of the memos is still ongoing.
7. In the broadcast, CBS failed to state that most or all experts will only attempt to authenticate original documents. CBS posessed only copies.
8. CBS interviewed Killian’s son prior to broadcast, but suppressed it when he cast doubt on the memos’ authenticity.
9. CBS misrepresented retired National Guard Maj. Gen. Bobby Hodges’ validation of the memos. Instead of reviewing them, he was read their text over the phone and given the impression that they were Killian’s handwritten notes.

CBS News’ conduct in the nine days since airing “60 Minutes”

10. CBS has not acknowledged the errors of fact in the memos
11. CBS has not acknowledged the errors in military correspondence formatting in the memos.
12. CBS never mentioned Joseph Newcomer’s typographic analysis, posted three days after the broadcast. Newcomer proved that the memos were written in a TrueType font that was not developed until 1989, meaning—unless Newcomer is credibly challenged —forgery is the certain explanation.
13. CBS shopped for a favorable opinions in the aftermath of the “60 Minutes” broadcast, putting forth as “expert” the opinion of 70s-era IBM typewriter technician Bill Glennon, after he had stepped forward to defend the memos in the comments section of a prominent website.
14. CBS has not acknowledged the logic of its “arguing in the alternative” when interpreting National Guard secretary Marian Knox’s recollections. CBS disbelieves her when she calls the memos forged, but urges belief when she says the memos reflect what Killian thought. Does CBS find her credible, or not?
15. CBS has not acknowledged Killian’s son’s challenges to its version of events, including his belief that Knox did not work closely enough with his father to know his opinions.
16. CBS has not acknowledged Killian’s widow’s assertions that her late husband was a poor typist, and did not keep personal files at home.
17. CBS has never said where the memos came from. Through Sunday, they simply labeled the source as “unimpeachable.”

Three conclusions jump out after a review of this list.

First, CBS News was, at best, reckless and grossly negligent in broadcasting its “60 Minutes” story.

Second, conclusive proof that the Killian memos are forgeries was widely known by 9/12, four days after broadcast.

Third, CBS News has persisted (at least through Sunday, 9/19) in covering up evidence of the forgeries, becoming, at a minimum, an accessory after the fact to fraud.

The Baltimore Sun

The points I have listed are well-known to readers of this essay, and the conclusions I drew are unremarkable. However, it is worth remembering that this audience gets its news from web-logs as well as from the mainstream media. How do things look to a person who relies on The Baltimore Sun for coverage of the news?

A check of the Sun’s online search engine yields links to 30 articles from Sept. 9 through Sept. 19. None of these reports provides a synopsis of most, or even many, of the seventeen points listed above. But what news articles did readers of the paper edition of the newspaper get a chance to see?

Lexis/Nexis searches show that the Sun printed nine news articles during that time. (In addition, the Sun published a few letters, and two op-ed pieces favorable to Bush, “Yellow Journalism” by Douglas MacKinnon of Sept. 14, and “Rather, CBS News dig themselves into a hole” by Linda Chavez on Sept. 16.) The day after “60 Minutes” aired, Sun reporter David Greene reported CBS’ accusations on page 1. Sun reporter David Folkenflik contributed five stories (Sept. 11, Sept. 13, Sept. 15, Sept. 16, Sept. 17, and Sept. 18). These six articles covered, or at least indirectly alluded to, the following points:

—Numbers 1, 4, 5, 8, 15, 17.

These points were not covered or referred to:

—Numbers 2, 3, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16.

In fairness, Folkenflik published an important scoop on Sept. 16, with the first of the interviews with Linda James and Emily Wills in which they disputed CBS’ accounting of their analyses of the memos.

On Saturday, the Sun printed nothing.

On Sunday, there were three articles. The AP reported that Bush doesn’t recall disputed documents. Howard Witt of the Chicago Tribune contributed Some bloggers limit their ‘transparency’. The Sun’s Public Editor Paul Moore penned an op-ed, The risks of reporting on reporting of others.

How do the weekend’s three stories on the Killian memos characterize the current state of knowledge? The AP: “The authenticity of the documents has come into question.” Howard Witt: “Mainstream newspapers and broadcasters quickly picked up on the bloggers’ allegations and consulted forensic document experts, who weighed in with conflicting opinions over whether typewriters of the era could have produced the Killian memos.” Paul Moore: “The issue of document authenticity, which primarily focuses on whether the typeface and spacing of the 1970s’ Guard memos were available on typewriters of that era, is not yet resolved.”

Leave aside Witt’s near-lie (“experts…weighed in with conflicting opinions”: can Witt name a single expert on CBS’s side?). What about the seventeen aspects of CBS News behavior? These were covered in this weekend’s articles:

—None.

These were not covered:

—Numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17.

Is the Baltimore Sun particularly bad at covering national news in comparison to papers in similar big-city markets? I don’t think so; the Sun maintains bureaus around the country and internationally, and is probably better at this than most of its competitors. My guess is that this kind of analysis of most newspapers’ coverage would turn up similar, or worse, performance.

The fact remains that, this weekend, the Baltimore Sun fed its readers analysis and conclusions that were over a week out of date. The quotes from Sunday’s paper are more than misleading, they are provably wrong (“The issue of document authenticity … is not yet resolved.”). The person who reads the Baltimore Sun and watches the CBS Evening News has never been presented with the most powerful evidence that shows that the memos are certain forgeries, much less that CBS was reckless in broadcasting “60 Minutes,” and is now party to an ongoing deception.

What has brought us to this sorry state? Reporters and editors go to journalism school and work at newspapers because they want to cover and report on the news. They are smart, well-informed people, educated in their crafts. Yet, in the midst of a whirlwind of newsworthy developments—all pointing in the same direction, that of forgery—why were many newspaper readers left out-of-touch with the reality of this case? What accounts for this failure of the news-distribution process?

UPDATE: Linked to Beltway Traffic Jam.