Posted on 09/13/2004 12:25:29 PM PDT by areafiftyone
As everyone knows by now, last week "60 Minutes" aired a "report" by "newsman" Dan Rather that "revealed" something damaging about President Bush's early 1970s service in the Texas Air National Guard. Exactly what, we do not know; as we noted Thursday, we find the topic too boring to think about.
But it turns out there is a fascinating story here, a story of journalistic fraud, of bloggers humbling ye olde media, and, very likely, of political dirty tricks. Shortly after Rather's story aired, blogger John Hinderaker wrote a post on PowerLineBlog.com in which he noted that the four memos that were central to Rather's story appeared to have been produced on modern word-processing equipment, not 1970s-vintage typewriters. (The memos' putative author has been dead for 20 years, conveniently for Rather.)
At least one of those memos is unquestionably fraudulent. Blogger Charles Johnson typed the text of the memo, putatively written on Saturday, Aug. 18, 1973, into Microsoft Word using the Times New Roman font and default tab-stop and margin settings. The result was an exact match: Everything from which words fell on which line to the annoying little superscript th after an ordinal number was identical. Here is an animated GIF file Johnson prepared that shows the CBS version and his re-creation:
(Excerpt) Read more at opinionjournal.com ...
CAUGHT ONE!
THIS IS THE GREATEST GRAPHIC I HAVE SEEN YET, THIS DESERVES THE STAR TREATMENT ON FOXNEWS
bttt
Blogger Johnson deserves a journalist award!
It's easy to recreate this on a word processor. Has anyone shown it can be created on an old typewriter?
That quote from the poster @ DU is stunningly hateful.
Now, class, that is what we call an effective use of quotation marks. Or, as they are sometimes called in this context, sneer marks.
Metaphor Alert
"The bait-and-switch substitution of World War II for Vietnam quickly proved a bridge too far for both candidates. Just when they thought they had fled Vietnam, it returned, whacking them in the face like a perpetually revolving door. No sooner did Mr. Kerry's convention end than he was impaled by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. No sooner did the Republicans leave New York than word got out that '60 Minutes' was poking anew into the president's National Guard stint, a Pandora's box of unanswered questions first unlocked by The Boston Globe four years ago."--former theater critic Frank Rich, New York Times, Sept. 12
LOL! Frank Rich writes like Yoko Ono sings.
If you liked that one, this is even better:
http://mysite.verizon.net/vze6vxcr/
thanks for posting...
"And then what did Cobain do next?"
Funny you should ask that. There is a blog, "Defeat JohnJohn.com" that is prepared to pay $37,900 at this writing (it started as $10,000 but others have pledged in) to anyone who can "reasonably" recreate the documents exactly with 1972 technology.
So far, nobogy is close. They probably won't be, because the documents display a typographic feature, "negative offsets", that is peculiar to TrueType font technology (which was developed by Apple and Microsoft in the early 1990s as an alternative to professional PostScript type).
The DefeatJohnJohn guy will be moving the contest, and supporting evidence, on to a new domain, Stop60Minutes.com. (Dig the cool graphic). Right now, the information is still at the first link. Enjoy.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
LOL I like that!
LOL I am amazed at the great stuff that comes out so quickly.
And that TV screen soon goes for 60 Minutes as well ....
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