I have very little to add to the most important story in the blogosphere right now—the use of possibly forged documents by CBS news. If you want to read about it go to the sole link I’ll provide here on this subject. Joe Gandelman of The Moderate Voice has a fine summary of the story so far.
But I am incredibly proud of the blogosphere. It’s not just 50,000,000 monkeys with 50,000,000 typewriters. Different bloggers viz. Don Sensing, Charles at Little Green Footballs, and Bill at INDC Journal taking very different approaches (analyzing military procedures, using specialist knowledge of desktop publishing, and identifying an authoritative source) have cast very serious doubt on the authenticity of an important story from CBS News.
And now the blogosphere is continuing the conversation. Some bloggers are speculating on the implications for the Kerry campaign, the Bush campaign, big media, Dan Rather, CBS, and the blogosphere. Others are questioning the findings. Still others questioning the questioners. Some Bush-supporting bloggers may be a trifle triumphalist in tone. Some Kerry-supporting bloggers may be a tad shrill. But by and large the conversation is pretty civil and contributes to the story itself. There’s real synergy at work here, a kind of synergy just not possible to Old Media with their one-way point of view.
And we’re seeing (variously) well-informed citizens taking an active part in the coverage of an election that will shape their world. Jefferson would be proud.
Why are you doubting these documents when the White House has re-released them without casting doubt on them?
Wouldn’t the White House have denied it if it wasn’t true?
And yet you chimpanzees with keyboards made no effort to debunk the Swiftboat lies. What’s wrong with you?
Sorry. Just, in line with your “Why won’t they say something interesting?” post, it just doesn’t make sense that this should be the most important story in the blogosphere right now.
It’s old news. Everybody already knows that Bush ignored orders to take his physical and that he got grounded because of it. Everybody already knows that he blew off his national guard service. Everybody already knows that a lot of the records have mysteriously disappeared, and important documents that in theory should have been signed by a collection of people were all signed by one guy who’s dead now. What’s all the fuss about? There’s no *news* here.
J Thomas, please note that I don’t have a long post on this taking any position whatsoever on the claims or counter-claims. All I’ve written is that some bloggers have cast serious doubt on a memo. Isn’t that self-evident? And I don’t have a bunch of links to partisans on one side or the other. Just a single link to a summary for someone who might be interested in what it’s all about.
I honestly don’t much care about what either Mr. Bush or Mr. Kerry did 30 years ago. But I do think that the dialogue in the blogosphere is interesting and important.
Note also that I don’t have a long string of posts about the Swift Boat Vets or Mr. Kerry’s Viet Nam service. As I’ve posted—that’s not too interesting to me either.
I just read the following on a CBS web page refuting the forgery claims with the following: There’s one document from May 1972 that contains a normal “th” on the top. To produce that in Microsoft Word, you would have to go out of your way to type the letters and then turn the “th” setting off, or back up and then type it again.
I’m a professional typesetter and have been doing computer typesetting since 1987 so I know all the tricks. If I wanted to type 125th in word, even with the auto-superscript feature turned on all I would have to do is type “125 the ” to fool the superscript feature and the spell checker, then backspace and delete the space between the words and the “e” , then continue on my merry way. That’s not much to ask for someone who is taking all the time required to create the document in the first place. These same experts also claim that it is impossible to use a lower case “L” as a 1, which old typewriters used to have to do. (I can remember my first few typewriters had no number 1 key at all). That’s totally bogus. You can type any string of letters and numbers (like CBS2.com) and you won’t even get a spelling error, and of course you could do the same trick as I mentioned earlier. And here is the rub – if the typewriter is so old and primitive that it doesn’t have a separate “1” key, how can it produce the superscripted “th” character also used? There seems to be a bit of a discrepancy here.
And there are lots of old versions of word, PageMaker, QuarkXPress, etc. that don’t default to auto superscript, so why do they automatically assume that a forger would be using a specific computer program? I think they are stretching for explanations here.
If I could get a look at an accurate scan of these documents I believe I can determine whether they were typed or not using some methods I haven’t heard being used yet, but would be more definitive than anything else I’ve seen so far. If anyone knows where copies might be available, please let me know.
James Giordano
Lighthouse Publications