Little Green Footballs - The Hailey Report is Back, Just in Time (Rathergate Document Dump FRI?)

Little Green Footballs.com ^ | 12/9/2004 | Charles

[weegee]

Rumor has it that the results of the investigation into CBS Memogate are going to be released tomorrow.

And in a rather ... uh ... curious coincidence, Dr. David Hailey, the Utah State professor who is desperately, quixotically trying to prove the CBS memos are real, has released what he claims as the final version of his shoddy, laughable "analysis". And I'm sure you won't be shocked at all to discover that his conclusion is ... the documents were typed. On a magical typewriter that somehow produced an exact duplicate of a Microsoft Word document, down to the spacing, line breaks, and tab stops ... in 1972.

Hailey produced neither the actual typewriter, nor any actual typewritten documents proving his case. Instead, he used a computer to create his examples, by cutting and pasting sections from different fonts, and moving them around letter by letter to get a close match. In the original version of his report, you could actually see the crude cut and paste job in one example; that example has now been removed.

Read it for yourself. Hailey's report is here. (PDF file.)

Would it be overly cynical to suggest that we shouldn't be surprised at all to see this mendacious analysis cited in the CBS investigation?

Wizbang has a post this morning pointing out the numerous flaws, questionable conclusions, and bogus methodology in the report.

But for the really crushing refutation, see the peer review done by Dr. Joseph M. Newcomer - a real typography expert -who flays Hailey's work down to the bone: The Hailey Connection.

The fix is in, folks, and the whitewash is on the way.

UPDATE at 12/9/04 7:58:33 am:

Dr. David Hailey, by the way, donated money to the John F. Kerry campaign: Donor name: Hailey. (Hat tip: Jeremy.)

[eureka!]

"I just hope everyone who sees it e-mails it to their children, friends, and relatives. I have waited many years for CBS to get caught with their pants down."

Well, it was worth the wait, notwithstanding the damage they did in the meanwhile. Rather's legacy will always be Memogate. Like Clinton, he ain't going to change that legacy thingy either...

[izzatzo]

Another Clinton legacy, the late Friday document/news dump. I think seeBS learned quite a bit from good ol' Slick.

[mewzilla]

LOL. Note to CBS's affiliates: Incoming!!!

Again. Heh heh heh. Couldn't happen to a nicer network.

[supercat]

It's interesting that the report mentions a lot of things that would be relevant if the documents being examined were either original typed documents or high-quality (1200dpi+) copies of them but are trivial compared with the faxing artifacts it doesn't even mention.

Indeed, Mr. Hailey gives great importance to certain details of the letter shapes as they appear in the CBS reports, while ignoring that the shapes that appear there are almost certainly not the shapes that were present on the originally-faxed document.

In particular, the device that faxed the documents used a pixelization algorithm which preserves relative line thickness at the expense of relative line placement. Small details are always rendered as being a minimum of two pixels high in the vertical direction; the shape of that two-pixel-high image will be affected by the top and bottom side of the detail being faxed.

He notes that Times New Roman has a slanted top on the '1', whereas the samples don't. What he fails to note is that the underside of the top of the '1' is horizontal. Many other letters which appear with deformed serifs have curves on the 'insides' of the serifs even though the outsides are straight. This would again be consistent with the type of faxing artifacts I described.

Proportional spacing is not impossible with a typewriter; someone with a very steady hand could achieve whatever spacing was desired by using one hand to hold the carriage in proper position (with the thumb on the release) while the other hand types. Indeed, many typists have done this on occasion when replacing e.g. a seven-letter word with a ten-letter word (a half-space shift will get one extra letter in neatly, but typing two characters on adjacent half-spaces is ugly); using fudgy spacing is still a big ugly, but not quite so bad.

Of course, the likelihood of a typist doing an entire document that way, with spacing that just so happens to match Times New Roman...

Out of curiosity, did the versions of Times New Roman used by printing houses in 1972 have the modern "f" shape? Look at some old books and you'll notice that the lowercase "f" changed with the advent of phototypesetting.

[weegee]

PING

[weegee]

Animated gif showing overlay of the forgery with text from MS-Word:

[Buckhead]

Thanks for the ping. I saw this on LGF earlier today. Newcomer makes this Ute a laughingstock. Hard to believe CBS would be so dense as to rely on the Ute, but we'll see.

[supercat]

I've seen those demonstrations. Indeed, they underly my basic point: even if it would have been technologically possible for somebody in 1972 to produce a document that matched the CBS memos, the probability that anyone would have done so, given that no copies of Microsoft's "Times New Roman" font width table are believed to have existed then, is essentially zero (even if it were discovered that Microsoft stole the width table from someplace, the likelihood that someone in 1972 would have produced a document using it would still be essentially nil).

But as I said what I found interesting about Mr. Healey's piece is that he focuses on many technical minutiae which, even if prevent in the original documents, would have been obscured by a generation or two of faxing. I also find interesting the way he tries to make comparisons with Times-Bold, which is assuredly not the font used. While I don't particularly fault those who earlier guessed Bookman or New Century Schoolbook (the latter would have been my first guess), an analysis of the serifs and what faxing did to them makes clear the character shapes are all consistent with Times New Roman whereas some are inconsistent with most other fonts.

[weegee]

I want CBS to present the original signed document (typewritten and ink signature on the same sheet).

In the absence, they got s!!t.

[FreedomCalls]

Out of curiosity, did the versions of Times New Roman used by printing houses in 1972 have the modern "f" shape? Look at some old books and you'll notice that the lowercase "f" changed with the advent of phototypesetting.

Are you talking about "kerning" the f into the fi and ffi?

[nopardons]

bttt

[supercat]

Are you talking about "kerning" the f into the fi and ffi?

Actually, I'm talking about the shape of the character in cases where it isn't kerned. Looking through some moderately-old books (before 1970) it appears that the letter "f" only has its "modern" shape when it's part of a ligature. Otherwise the top is much narrower than is common in modern typefaces, probably because of the difficulty in producing overhangs.

Note, btw, that technologies certainly existed in 1972 which could produce overhangs. Someone using a pantograph engraver, for example, would have had no trouble (see an 1878 page of sheet music for an example). Even lead type could reproduce overhanging characters, although the type necessary for doing so was very delicate and would have been incompatible with automated typesetting equipment; it's doubtful anyone in 1972 would use such type for anything except the most demanding documents.

In a way, btw, I find it interesting that while there was no technological hurdle to the IBM Executive producing a lowercase "f" that would overhang the following character (it would probably be possible to modify one to do so by adjusting whatever gizmo controls spacing), it doesn't do so. I'd think the output would look better if it did. I also find it surprising that IBM didn't produce a golfball-compatible version of the Executive (i.e. a typewriter that used interchangeable balls but allowed the crude proportional spacing of the typebar-based Executive). Mechanically it wouldn't seem all that hard.