Question: What is a Typewriter?
What if it is fake on purpose? Sort of...
If I was a PA on 60 Minutes charged with creating the digital graphics for this story the following might happen:
After scanning the original documents I find they are illegible digitally. So I retype verbatim screen shot, bring it into PhotoShop, paste, apply a dimestore old XEROX filter, then photoshop out the signature and place it. Deadline met, the stylized graphic for production has been created. In general the networks do not require the actual document be shown, they have often in the past insisted it is ok to display the actual text in whatever format meets their production needs. So long as the content is not changed.
It needs to be confirmed that those images on the web, and in the show are images of the actual documents before this story goes on.
I am just saying we should start with the question are these the real documents? Cause these images are not consistent with the period.
-- l8s
-- jrawk
Good work. Now send this to CBS. All your original work and make no copies. This is series and hughe.
what is a little green football?
Good work.
This has already been explored in depth.
http://www.littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/
You'll also note that contemporaneous Air Force docs are all in courier or some similar non-proportional pitch.
Great point. I'd be willing to bet that whoever "did" this document is some young smartarse who doesn't remember life before computers, and has never seen a typewriter.
Remember, there are a lot of people in the country who've never even seen carbon paper. They just sort of assume that Xerox machines have been here all along.
You didn't whack a Selectric.
Back in the day, hypens were used to continue words onto the next page. Its all but disappeared now that word processing automactically knocks the lenthened word down to the next line below.
In addition, you might check out the spacing on that memo. For example, if had typed a long word before I reached "the bell" I would have to use a hypen to continue the word on the next line because I sure damn well could not erase it, unless of course I faked it on a modern day word processor.
I think on the bottom where it says "Signed, Epstein's Mother" was the dead-givaway. ;)
Geez, who was the document/forgery expert that CBS used? Helen Keller?
Good catch!
maybe 60 minutes needs to investigate 60 minutes
Shouldn't the memo to W have a serial number? Doesn't all official DoD correspondence have a serial number? If so, that number should be recorded in a log book somewhere, though probably long-destroyed.
This story is getting more and more interesting. It would take mighty big balls for "See B S" to send a known forgery to the WH and then use it for a program. If shown to be true, I would predict the end of "See B S" getting press passes at all to the WH from that point forward. If they just put out lies, why bother to have them there at all?
You are absolutely correct about this. I remember being ingrained to either stop at a short word or use a "-" to break up the word and continue because there was no such think as wordwrap on a typewriter. I was looking at the (fake) document last night and something was really bugging me about it...this is it.