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Free Republic's Faux News Awards First Place Winner (by a landslide):
CBS News for the Sixty Minutes II broadcast on Sept. 8, 2004 that used forged documents to attack President Bush's Texas Air National Guard service...
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Post 47 and RaTHergate
- The story of how CBS was caught perpetrating a hoax on the American People
Intellectual Conservative ^ | 17 September 2004 | by David M. Huntwork
Posted on 09/17/2004 10:47:05 AM PDT by Jim Robinson

The story of how CBS was caught perpetrating a hoax on the American People.

Poor Lt. Col. Killian died in 1984 but I believe he would be surprised at the stir he created some twenty years after his death. On the evening of September 8th, CBS's 60 Minutes II dropped what they considered to be a (rather convenient) "bombshell" regarding President Bush's service in the National Guard. Directly contradicting Defense Department records showing that in 1973 Lt. Col. Killian praised Mr. Bush's performance and approved his honorable discharge, four memos from Killian impugning the service of Bush during those years were produced with much fanfare. According to CBS, they consulted a handwriting analyst and document expert who believed the material to be authentic.

Few have published the origination of the chain of events that led up to the implosion at CBS and the stripping of all credibility from Dan Rather. The now famous Freeper Post #47 appeared just hours after the CBS expose on the online community www.FreeRepublic.com.
Post # 47 To: Howlin

Howlin, every 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.

This should be pursued aggressively. 47 posted on 09/08/2004 8:59:43 PM PDT by Buckhead

A few hours earlier another alert Freeper had posted this just minutes after the CBS story aired. Already, the now obvious doubts about the Killian memos were raising a few eyebrows in the blogger community:
To: Howlin

WE NEED TO SEE THOSE MEMOS AGAIN!

They are not in the style that we used when I came in to the USAF. They looked like the style and format we started using about 12 years ago (1992). Our signature blocks were left justified, now they are right of center...like the ones they just showed.
Can we get a copy of those memos?

107 posted on 09/08/2004 5:19:00 PM PDT by TankerKC

The Minneapolis lawyers who run Powerlineblog.com were quickly notified. Two of the blog's readers directed their attention to post #47 on a FreeRepublic.com thread. That day's post on powerlineblog can be viewed here.

After that, the rolling snowball quickly became an avalanche. Several other major blogs, including www.Instapundit.com, quickly seized on this historic breaking story. Less than twenty four hours after the initial Freeper posts, Drudge did what Drudge does best with the headline "Bloggers drive hoax probe into Bush memos..."
CLICK HERE for the rest of that thread