Posted on 01/03/2005 11:43:18 PM PST by SuthrnGirl
“The drama began when CBS posted forged National Guard documents on its Web site and, that same evening, an attentive ‘Freeper’ (a regular at the conservative FreeRepublic.com Internet site) named Buckhead raised suspicion of fraud. From there, intrepid bloggers Powerlineblog.com and Little Green Footballs, the Woodward and Bernstein of Rathergate, began to document the mounting signs of forgery.” — Chris Weinkopf in The American Enterprise Online
“The yeomen of the blogosphere and AM radio and the Internet took [CBS’s 60 Minutes II] down. It was to me a great historical development in the history of politics in America. It was Agincourt.” — Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal
“NOTE to old media scum . . . . We are just getting warmed up!” — “Rrrod,” on FreeRepublic.com
Bloggers have claimed the attack on CBS News as their Boston Tea Party, a triumph of the democratic rabble over the lazy elites of the MSM (that’s mainstream media to you).
(Excerpt) Read more at cjr.org ...
His resume:http://www.coreypein.com/resume.htm
Yep. It's hard to believe that this scumbag is still trying to throw some shadow of doubt over the obvious forgeries. (Yawn.) It's over Corey - - Bush won, CBS and Dan Rather and Mary Mapes are disgraced forever, and oh yeah, Bush won.
They're talking about you again.
Yikes! This guy is going to get Fisked within an inch of his life in the coming days. I almost feel sorry for him.
Almost...
Woah! a partisan mind can be a very scary thing.
Baghdad Bob writes! All that hard typography evidence approaching your mind is flawed and inconclusive. Do not believe those reports!
Ha! Right, the ONLY typewriter that could have even come close to writing this memo was the IBM selectric and the IBM selectric was incredibly expensive and certainly not in the possession of the TANG. Furthermore, Killian's secretary has said so.
This kind of "Baghdad Bob reporting" is evidence that a large portion of the "intellectuals" in our Country are losing their ability to think rationally....very scary. Intellectual lobotomies?
I had a few pages up just a few days into Rathergate, Corey. Sorry you missed them. Really - I am. Maybe I need to advertise more. No, that 'th' was not possible. But worse, its specific appearance in those memos was the literal default in MS Word. You had to take care to make sure it DIDN'T happen. Not with 'st', not with 'nd', but 'th'. Word default. Automatic. And it would look - just like that. And Kinko's tends to rent out computers with MS Word . . Corey. Burkett was familiar with Kinko's, apparently had an account, and it was a local meeting place for the Dems in the area.
Fact is, Corey, you can line up almost letter for letter the CBS memos and the same text quickly typed into MS Word with the default settings. Line spacing - a match. Word boundries - a match. Heck, every letter - a match. It's not a coincidence. You can't do that with an IBM Composer, which did have a closely similar font in one of its typeballs. Those with Composers tried it themselves, Corey. Letter and line spacing were different. MS Word - spot on match. And no one would even have used a typesetter like that for a memo like that.
So you must argue that the initial representations were precisely wrong. Killian didn't use a typewriter, but a PC and dumped the result to a laserprinter. And he wrote as someone unfamiliar with the jargon, or as someone trying to piece it together from scraps. That might make sense if the date were 1992. But it wasn't. It was 1972. And Microsoft hadn't been founded. Laserprinters were probably not yet even a thing of the labs (I don't know). Windowing metaphors were still themselves a thing of the labs, namely PARC. If it could only have been a typewriter, and the only typewriter of that era didn't match the memos, and the PC you can rent with MS Word at the local Kinko's, in 2004, did - then Corey . . . use that brain cell. What does it tell you, Mr. Pain?
Mr Pein
I have read your recent piece in the CJR, and am troubled by your observations.
Clearly you believe that the efforts of the 'experts' at CBS outweigh the amateur sleuthing of 'bloggers' on the internet. Let's look at a few items from your piece:
>>First, much of the bloggers’ vaunted fact-checking was seriously warped<<
Last time I checked, 'bloggers' - actually, amateurs discussing current events on a political forum - ought be not held to the same rigorous fact-checking as a corporation that accepts money for and advertises itself under the guise of being a 'news organization'. Can you see the distinction?
>>Second, and worse, the reviled MSM often followed the bloggers’ lead.<<
Please show examples of the 'mainstream media' that held Rather's feet to the fire on this. When did Brokaw, Jennings or Wolf Blitzer call for Rather's head? Washington Post? NYTimes? (Hint: They didn't. Even Bill O'Reilly defended him, for Chrissakes)
>>We don’t know whether the memos were forged, authentic, or some combination thereof. <<
Yes, exactly! Neither did CBS. Precisely why Rather shouldn't have used them! You can't possibly be this stupid!
>>Indeed, they could be fake but accurate, as Killian’s secretary, Marian Carr Knox, told CBS on September 15.<<
Um, no. "Fake but accurate" is Orweillian double-speak for "lie". Please Corey, define accuracy as you - the journalist - understand it.
>>Ultimately, we don’t know enough to justify the conventional wisdom: that the documents were “apparently bogus” (as Howard Kurtz put it, reporting on Dan Rather’s resignation) and that a major news network was an accomplice to political slander.<<
Bullsh!t. Rather has not, cannot and will not refute those questioning his use of the documents. This alone reduces their validity to zero. You ought to Google "Occam's Razor".
>>The very first post attacking the memos — nineteen minutes into the 60 Minutes II program — was on the right-wing Web site FreeRepublic.com by an active Air Force officer, Paul Boley of Montgomery, Alabama, who went by the handle “TankerKC.” Nearly four hours later it was followed by postings from “Buckhead,” whom the Los Angeles Times later identified as Harry MacDougald, a Republican lawyer in Atlanta.<<
You didn't note Dan Rather's political leaning in your piece. Or anyone supporting Rather's claims. Why?
>>Hailey wasn’t the only one to feel the business end of a blog-mob. The head of one CBS affiliate said he received 5,000 e-mail complaints after the 60 Minutes II story, only 300 of which were from his viewing area.<<
Is accountability in the media a local or global issue? Better that this affiliate only hear from his constituents?
>>In order to understand “Memogate,” you need to understand “Haileygate.” David Hailey, a Ph.D. who teaches tech writing at Utah State University — not a professional document examiner, but a former Army illustrator — studied the CBS memos. His typographic analysis found that, contrary to widespread assumptions, the document may have been typed.<<
I'm with Hailey on this. Typed indeed! It would take forever to hand draw all that lettering. But, Corey, you've already dismissed the use of copies as legitimate. Why bring up Hailey?
>>Someone found a draft of his work on a publicly accessible university Web site, and it wound up on a conservative blog, Wizbang. The blog, citing “evidence” that it had misinterpreted, called Hailey a “liar, fraud, and charlatan.” Soon Hailey’s e-mail box was flooded. Anonymous callers demanded his dismissal.<<
Hailey has to learn to hide his stuff on the internet. I will go on record against Hailey if it helps get him fired. Some tech writer! What a moron!
Corey, your greatest error is the most telling:
Free Republic is not a blog. It is an amateur political discussion forum that pre-dates 'blogs' and the even the internet as it is today known. Free Republic is not a 80 year old corporation that accepts money and promotes itself as an icon of independence. Free Republic started as a repository and discussion forum on Prodigy's BBS, early in the Clinton years. A 'blog' or 'web-log' is understood (by the unwashed) to be the diary of an individual or a small group. Even a rookie reporter would not have made such an obvious error.
Have you visited FR?
You are clearly bent on partisanship at the expense of reputaton- hardly the sort of accusation an aspiring journalist ought to open himself to in the post-Jayson Blair/Dan Rather world. And your snide manner belies your obvious higher cause in writing this dreck: You want to be noticed by the 'club' of liberal elites and brought into the fold for the selfless act of having thrown yourself on the pyre of Dan Rather's career.
Bravo! We can't wait dissect you!
- Incpen - FReeper #179, exposing morons like Corey Pein since (before) 1997
Look here, chumpo:
I lived it. I dont need to read about it.
.
NEVER FORGET
...And longtime LIBERAL Los Angeles Times Media Critic DAVID SHAW still tells the American People in Time of War that:
RATHER's work 'Shoddy, 'Sliphsod' not LIBERAL..?
http://www.Freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1227809/posts
NEVER FORGET
.
Pein fails miserably as an investigative reporter, since he is one of the few in the media who hasn't been able to readily derive from reading the mountains of evidence by experts that the CBS Bush guard memo's were indeed fakes. But Pein is rather unintentionally amusing in this other article, as a not too discreet liberal writing a review of a gun mazazine...very funny stuff...
Here are some good critiques of Pein's error filled article "Blog-Gate", although it was of such poor amateurish quality, it might best have been ignored:
Memogate: The experts and the amateurs
And of course the LGF and Wizbang blogs thoroughly demolish Pein's article:
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=14182_An_Inept_Smear_at_Columbia_Journalism_Review
Corey Pein of the Columbia Journalism Review sent us an email yesterday, with a link to his article in that magazine on the fake 60 Minutes documents. "You may be interested in this," he wrote. We were interested, all right, but we're sorry to report that the article is astonishingly bad.
Pein's perspective is sympathetic to Dan Rather, Mary Mapes and CBS, and hostile toward the bloggers and others who exposed the fraud that 60 Minutes participated in, intentionally or otherwise. This gives his article a weirdly off-balance perspective. Pein holds out hope that the documents may not have been forgeries after all. He writes that:
We don’t know whether the memos were forged, authentic, or some combination thereof. Indeed, they could be fake but accurate, as Killian’s secretary, Marian Carr Knox, told CBS on September 15.
So this is now, apparently, an accepted journalistic standard: fake but accurate. Which means, I guess: fake, but they help the Democratic candidate. Again, Pein says:
Ultimately, we don’t know enough to justify the conventional wisdom: that the documents were “apparently bogus” (as Howard Kurtz put it, reporting on Dan Rather’s resignation) and that a major news network was an accomplice to political slander.
Pein concludes with the wistful thought that maybe the mainstream media in general, and CBS in particular, didn't have to take a hit in connection with Memogate:
When the smoke cleared, mainstream journalism’s authority was weakened. But it didn’t have to be that way.
Pein's thesis is that the bloggers are just as blameworthy as CBS, if not more so:
[O]n close examination the scene looks less like a victory for democracy than a case of mob rule... CBS’s critics are guilty of many of the very same sins.
Pein thus joins Wonkette as the only commentators who, to my knowledge, have tried to argue that the bloggers' exposure of CBS's fraudulent documents was unfortunate. If the documents were fakes, their position is simply untenable. Recognizing this, Pein tries half-heartedly to show that the documents might have been genuine after all. But this effort is an utter failure:
1) Pein never even mentions the most important evidence that the documents were forgeries, i.e., their substantive errors. The most important such error was the anachronistic effort to portray Brig. Gen. "Buck" Staudt as pressuring Lt. Col. Bobby Hodges to "sugar coat" Lt. Bush's evaluation -- a year and a half after Staudt retired from the Texas Air National Guard. This was the most important of the CBS documents, and based on its content alone, it was an obvious fraud, both fake and inaccurate. Case closed.
2) Pein's discussion of the typographical issues, which were always over-emphasized in the mainstream media, is feeble. He refers to only one of the typographical disputes, the superscript "th," and quotes none other than Bobby Hodges for the proposition that “The typewriter can do that little ‘th,’ sure it can.” Hodges, of course, went on to tell the CJR that the documents were obvious forgeries. Of the many other typographical problems, not a word; nor is there any acknowledgement of the fact that, taken altogether, the 2004 fakes did not remotely resemble authentic 1973 documents, as we showed on this site within hours after the controversy erupted on Sept. 9.
3) Pein admits that there were many discrepancies between the forged documents and authentic military practice in National Guard units of the 1970's. Having acknowledged no fewer than 21 such discrepancies, Pein half-heartedly suggests that two of the 21 might (or might not) be in doubt, and draws the inexplicable conclusion that "the press should never accept as gospel the first explanation that comes along." (By "the press," he evidently doesn't mean CBS.)
Beyond that, Pein fails to address obvious problems in the 60 Minutes story. Astonishingly, he tries to shore up Bill Burkett's credibility, quoting someone who described Burkett as "honest and forthright." This might, I suppose, carry some weight with readers who don't know that Burkett never served in the Texas Air National Guard; doesn't know President Bush from Adam; has a longstanding grievance against the Texas National Guard (Army) because of medical benefits he was denied; has suffered a series of what he describes as mental breakdowns, and suffered another mental breakdown while being interviewed by USA Today after the Memogate scandal broke; told a bizarre and obviously false story about the origin of the CBS documents--he got a call from a mystery woman named Lucy Ramirez, who told him to go to the Texas Livestock Show; he went to the show, didn't see Ms. Ramirez, but was approached by a man whom he'd never seen before; the man handed him an envelope and walked away; in the envelope were the National Guard documents; he took them home, made copies, burned the originals--of course, what a natural thing to do--and then presented the copies to CBS.
Pein does acknowledge that Burkett admitted lying to CBS about the origin of the documents, but passes this off as a matter of little consequence. About the broader issue of the apparent coordination between CBS and the Democratic National Committe, Pein is completely silent. If Pein knows that Burkett wrote in an email to fellow Texas Democrats that he gave the fake documents to Max Cleland, acting on behalf of the Kerry campaign, he doesn't let on.
Pein tries to indict the bloggers for possibly having been wrong in a small minority of the questions they raised on September 9. On the other hand, he has not a word of criticism for CBS. Mary Mapes has said that she pursued the National Guard story for five years. Yet CBS never checked into any of the issues that were raised by the bloggers; never questioned Burkett's credibility; and never contacted any of the living people who could have given the lie to the fake documents, like General Staudt. In an interview shortly after Rathergate broke, former CBS Vice-president Jonathan Klein explained that CBS had deliberately decided not to interview Staudt and others because they were believed to be Republicans, and CBS wanted its story to be objective. That's CBS's idea of objectivity--interview Democrats only--and apparently it's the Columbia Journalism Review's standard, too.
Pein tries to argue that the mainstream media talked to various friends and associates of President Bush after the CBS scandal broke, and identified them as such, but somehow did not sufficiently portray them as "right wing," etc. For example:
Joe Allbaugh was usually identified in press accounts — in The New York Times, the Baltimore Sun, and USA Today, to name a few — as Bush’s old chief of staff. He is much more. In 1999 Allbaugh, the self-described “heavy” of the Bush campaign, told The Washington Post, “There isn’t anything more important than protecting [Bush] and the first lady.”
Wow, there's a failing. Only describing Allbaugh as President Bush's former chief of staff wasn't enough to alert the audience to the fact that he was a dreaded Republican, whose knowledge should be disregarded.
On the other hand, Pein is remarkably sympathetic to the views of Bill Burkett, which, by any normal definition, are far out of the mainstream, compared to any of the "right wingers" whose information, Pein implies, should have been banned from media coverage of the scandal:
[M]any suppositions about Burkett are based on standards that were not applied evenly across the board. In November and December the first entry for “Bill Burkett” in Google, the most popular reference tool of the twenty-first century, was on a blog called Fried Man. It classifies Burkett as a member of the “loony left,” based on his Web posts. In these, Burkett says corporations will strip Iraq, obliquely compares Bush to Napoleon and “Adolf,” and calls for the defense of constitutional principles. These supposedly damning rants, alluded to in USA Today, The Washington Post, and elsewhere, are not really any loonier than an essay in Harper’s or a conversation at a Democratic party gathering during the campaign.
I could go on, but there is little point in doing so. CBS ostensibly "worked" on the National Guard story for years. They took fake documents from a notoriously unstable source who had no first-hand knowledge of President Bush's National Guard career, and who could not account for where he got them. On their face, the documents looked nothing like authentic National Guard memos of the 1970s that were in CBS's possession, but CBS asked no questions. CBS carried out no investigation to determine whether the memos were genuine, and made a point of not talking to people who were ostensibly quoted in the memos to determine whether the documents were accurate. They put the documents before the American public in the heat of an election campaign, and closely coordinated their story with a Democratic National Committee advertising campaign which dovetailed perfectly with the fake documents, and which began the morning after their broadcast. When questioned about the documents' apparent fraudulence, they stonewalled, and Dan Rather guaranteed the American people that the documents were authentic, because they came from an unimpeachable source.
The bloggers, on the other hand, began questioning the documents within hours after they appeared; raised many logical questions about their authenticity, the vast majority of which turned out to be valid; pointed out anachronisms within the documents that proved that their contents were false; and were ultimately proved correct in their suspicion that the documents were fakes. Nearly all of which occurred, not over a period of years, which CBS had to pursue its "story," but over the space of twelve hours.
And the Columbia Journalism Review thinks it is the bloggers who are blameworthy in this story. Sad. Very sad. But I guess we know whose side the "journalists" are on.
UPDATE: Upon reflection, I realize that I was unfair to the estimable Wonkette. While she has said that there were negative as well as positive aspects to the bloggers' role in Rathergate, she has not actually suggested that it is unfortunate that the fraud was unmasked. As far as I know, Mr. Pein is alone in that belief, except, of course, for certain CBS employees.
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