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| I love puppets! |
‘Rathergate‘ (btw – there is a website of the same name) continues, and there is some really, really amusing new spin on it all. Lets start at the top. As you may have known if you weren’t living under a internet rock or compulsively driven to believe anything that is anti Bush the Killian memos “revealed” by CBS news on 60 minutes are forged. Not only forged but badly, stupidly and obviously forged (that’s a freecache link to the original page and a PDF version).
“The probability that any technology in existence in 1972 would be capable of producing a document that is nearly pixel-compatible with Microsoft’s Times New Roman font and the formatting of Microsoft Word, and that such technology was in casual use at the Texas Air National Guard, is so vanishingly small as to be indistinguishable from zero.” – Joseph M. Newcomer, Typography expert (see links above)
Now, there are problems with more of the documents but the real blood in the water started with that first memo. For a while CBS and Dan Rather were adamant in their efforts to assure the audience and the affiliated stations that they couldn’t possibly be lying to them (I don’t think it can be just wrong, this is so obvious it had to be a deliberate and willful ignorance or a lie) even to misquoting their own experts. Some of the staunchest wing nuts from the left crawled out of the woodwork to defend the memos and paint anyone who had a brain questions their authenticity as a, well, paranoid lunatic. That they had no clue what the fuck they were taking about understanding of the subject at hand didn’t seem to matter. The army of the clueless included a particularly clueless post from Kos, you know – the guy who thought “screw em” was a good evaluation of murdered Americans in Iraq?
The smell of blood is in the water, and there is a whiff in the air that Rather might have to take [[e2:the long walk]]…
“I think this is very, very serious,” said Bob Schieffer, CBS’s chief Washington correspondent. “When Dan tells me these documents are not forgeries, I believe him. But somehow we’ve got to find a way to show people these documents are not forgeries.” Some friends of Rather, whose contract runs until the end of 2006, are discussing whether he might be forced to make an early exit from CBS.” – quote in context
Then again, scapegoating has a long tradition…
“Mary Mapes, a Dallas-based producer, obtained the documents from a source that she and the network refuse to reveal, even though the documents themselves have been widely discredited.
Doubts about the authenticity of the documents have put the network and its anchor Dan Rather at the center of a controversy that continues to grow. After a series of defensive statements about the documents, the network has finally admitted there might be a problem with them.
[ snip ]
Some CBS employees are amused at Rather’s predicament.
One told Talon News, “Sooner of later something like this was going to happen. When you see how hard they’ve been working this National Guard story, you know they weren’t going to come up empty-handed one way or another.”
But because Rather is CBS’s franchise player with a contract that extends through 2006, fallout from any scandal is likely to fall on someone else at the network. An insider tells Talon News that Mapes is the most likely candidate. She has been working on this story for five years and obtained the documents that are now in dispute.” – quote in context
Meanwhile the sharks are biting…
“Despite this, and despite the network’s inability to find a single expert to back their story up, CBS continues to insist the memos are genuine. By doing so, they have tarnished whatever trust the mainstream, established media still retains in the United States.” – quote in context
* chomp *
“In an interview Thursday on “The Tony Snow Show” on Fox News Radio, former Sen. Bob Dole, R-Kan., added his voice to the growing calls for CBS to either investigate itself or appoint someone to do it.
“They are really losing a lot of credibility, because they won’t let go,” Dole said. “They’re like a bulldog. The trouble is, they haven’t got a bone; they’ve got steak.”
A CBS spokeswoman said Thursday that the network didn’t have any further reports being done on the story. The network has declined calls for an internal investigation and a spokeswoman said there isn’t one.” – quote in context
* chop * chomp * Andy Rooney stepped in for a bite!
“CBS curmudgeon Andy Rooney indicated yesterday he believes the controversial documents on President Bush’s National Guard service are fake and said it could cost Dan Rather down the road.
“I’m surprised at their reluctance to concede they’re wrong,” Rooney said, referring to CBS brass.” – quote in context
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| black eyed Dan… |
What about the ‘other’ 60 Minutes? The one on Sunday nights? They are running scared too…
“DON’T blame us old codgers at “60 Minutes.”
That’s the word from some who work at the venerable old CBS News show – the one that airs Sunday nights – who have been quietly calling some members of the media to make sure their show doesn’t get tarnished by the Texas National Guard document scandal that has erupted at the other “60 Minutes” – the one on Wednesday nights.” – quote in context
Personally? I think this about sums it up…
“Will that quiet the storm? Not likely. The moral of it all is that it is infinitely more difficult for journalists to make questionable assertions in the age of the blogosphere than it was in years past. There is an army of well-informed fact-checkers out there, all connected on the Internet. There are people who know about things like computer fonts, or IBM typewriters circa 1972, or the arcane terminology of the Air National Guard. Pick a completely different subject, and there will be people who know about that, too.
CBS was clearly angry that its judgment was questioned– by nobodies! “You couldn’t have a starker contrast between the multiple layers of checks and balances [at the network] and a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing,” said one former CBS executive who defended Mr. Rather.
Well, it turned out that the guy in his pajamas was right, at least this time.” – quote in context