60 Minutes Wednesday personnel were well aware that the September 8 Segment addressed extremely sensitive issues – the incumbent President’s TexANG service record in the midst of an increasingly bitter Presidential campaign. Indeed, Rather regarded the Segment as “radioactive.” Accordingly, senior personnel within CBS News, including those at 60 Minutes Wednesday, fully expected that there would be many critics. However, they seriously underestimated the ferocity of the assaults on the documents and CBS News’ alleged motives in airing the Segment.
The attacks on the September 8 Segment began virtually immediately. One of the first came on freerepublic.com, a website:
[E]very single one of these memos to file is in a proportionally spaced font, probably Palatino or Times New Roman. In 1972 people used typewriters for this sort of thing, and typewriters used monospaced fonts. The use of proportionally spaced fonts did not come into common use for office memos until the introduction of laser printers, word processing software, and personal computers. They were not widespread until the mid to late 90’s. Before then, you needed typesetting equipment, and that wasn’t used for personal memos to file. Even the Wang systems that were dominant in the mid 80’s used monospaced fonts. I am saying these documents are forgeries, run through a copier for 15 generations to make them look old.85
This was followed on the morning of September 9 by further attacks, mostly by bloggers with a conservative agenda, challenging the authenticity of the documents. These included stories on Powerlineblog.com86 and littlegreenfootballs.com.87 Finally, by about 3 p.m., Matt Drudge, the author of the widely read Drudge Report website, had joined the fray, and, thereafter, the onslaught of attacks on the authenticity of the Killian documents was unrelenting.
The initial attacks on the Killian documents focused on several technical issues. First, many critics claimed that the superscript “th” in the May 4, 1972 and August 18, 1973 memoranda did not exist on typewriters in the early 1970s.88 Second, others questioned the authenticity of the Killian documents because they displayed proportional spacing, which was...
85 Harry MacDougald, Documents Suggest Special Treatment for Bush in Guard, Sept. 8, 2004, at http://freerepublic.com/focuslf-news/1210662/posts?q=1&&page=1
86 See Powerline Wins, CBS Loses, Sept. 9, 2004, at http://powerlineblog.com/archives/2004-09.php. “Powerline” is a Minnesota-based blog run by John Hinderaker and Scott Johnson, both of whom are attorneys.
87 See Bush Guard Documents: Forgeries?, Sept. 9, 2004 at http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog1?entry=12524
88 Heyward was concerned early on about the superscript “th” issue. Thus, in the early evening of September 9, he had inquired of West: “What does Mapes say about the little ‘th’ that ABC mentioned?”
Interesting how the panel can simply assert the "conservative" agenda of the bloggers. BUT, after 3 months of investigation, they are unable to devine any political agenda on the part of CBS.