Posted on 05/01/2008 6:38:52 AM PDT by BufordP
On 4/11/08, The Newseum opened its new quarters in Washington, DC. I was specifically interested in an exhibit in the Internet, TV and Radio Gallery. The exhibit was "Bias at CBS" and it featured the September 2004 "60 Minutes II" Dan Rather report aimed at discrediting President Bush's service in the Air National Guard. This 9/04 report was meant to hurt Bush's re-election chances in November, 2004.
Comments among FReepers quickly exposed inconsistencies in the documents and led to bloggers on the internet exposing the report as deeply flawed, as well as using forged documents. These inconsistencies ultimately forced CBS to retract its story.
The exhibit describes "how conservative blogs flexed their muscle and played a most significant role in the 2004 election "by discrediting documents used in Rather's "60 Minutes II' report.
Below is a copy of Buckhead's famous post #47 which started the unraveling of Dan Rather's story. His post is displayed as part of the exhibit. The red text are working links.
NYTIMES ^ | 09/09/04 | KATHARINE Q. SEELYE and RALPH BLUMENTHAL
Posted on Wednesday, September 08, 2004 11:10:56 PM by Pikamax
WASHINGTON, Sept. 8 - President Bush's Vietnam-era service in the National Guard came under renewed scrutiny on Wednesday as newfound documents emerged ....
To: HowlinHowlin, 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.
It was thrill to see the key role played by Free Republic in exposing a media lie against Bush at a pivotal moment right before the November election. The Newseum will draw a lot of tourists and many will see this.
free dixie,sw
free dixie,sw
Prayers up for our hero, Jim Rob.
Hey, that is awesome.
will do
The thread has been up for a little while...and Jim keeps updating his condition and the steps being taken to fix the problems. I would rather post a new thread for every update, but I don’t imagine that would be very favorable. :(
The prospect [of getting bought out by Internet giants] is a very stark one for people who work in, write, and edit newspapers. For these people do not think of themselves as "content providers." They think much more highly of themselves than that. They believe they play a vital role, perhaps the most vital role, in the defense of the freedoms of every citizen. After all, who else is there to keep a vigilant watch over the official custodians of society? Who else is there to protect the people from the depredations of business and government? Is not freedom of speech—the very freedom that enables journalists to ply their trade—the first of our freedoms, primus inter pares, and who will guard it if not they?
Historically speaking, this attitude is of relatively recent vintage. It may, in fact, be an artifact of the rise of the same highly profitable monopoly newspapers and shared-monopoly television networks that were so profitable and consequently grew so powerful that they gave the members of their news force reason to believe they were not just working stiffs—the general attitude of newspapermen throughout most of the preceding era—but akin to a democratic nobility.
The immodesty of this idea led many newspaper professionals of the late 20th century into a category error. They came to confuse the significance of the subjects they were covering with the act of covering them. Proximity to the news made them a species of news. They wrote about government; therefore, they were equivalent to the government in importance. They reported a war, and their act of reporting a war came to loom as large as the war itself. Today, the death of a journalist in a war zone is assigned vastly more weight than the death of a soldier.
This error is very much in evidence in the Newseum. Its grandest displays are giant artifacts. On the third floor, there is an East German guard tower attached to a slab of the Berlin Wall; on the first floor, there is a huge twisted piece of metal that was the World Trade Center’s broadcast antenna. These are remarkable to behold and to contemplate, and they encourage one to reflect deeply on totalitarianism, Islamofascism, and terrorism. But what is important about them, what is thought-provoking about them, has absolutely nothing to do with journalism or with journalists; it has to do with actuality. If anything, the unearned grandiosity at work in the news business is one of the key elements behind the deep and abiding disdain that the American people have come to harbor for it.
OMGGG we are part of history
COOL
I think I have sent you this before - or maybe you sent it to me - but here it is again. This books on my next Amazon buy.
http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj16n2-7.html
BOOK REVIEWS
Dismantling Utopia: How Information Ended the Soviet Union
Scott Shane
Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1994, 324 pp.
From 1988 through 1991, Scott Shane, as a correspondent in Moscow for the Baltimore Sun, experienced firsthand the collapse of the Soviet empire. During those tumultuous years, the cracks that had always existed in the communist system of central planning and single-party rule widened until the system itself had to be dismantled, not merely reformed. Shane provides an insightful account of the fall of the Soviet empire; his central thesis is that “information slew the totalitarian giant.”
Under communism, the Soviet state had a monopoly on information. It was the duty of the secret police, the KGB, to know everything about everyone and the duty of bureaucrats to run the economy like a machine. But it was only a matter of time before the inherent contradictions of the Soviet system would clog the wheels of the giant machine and bring it to a halt. That time came with the ascent of Mikhail Gorbachev to power in March 1985.
snip
free dixie,sw
free dixie,sw
did you have a GRAND birthday.
we are ALL praying for JimRob, here.
free dixie,sw
It was a wonderful birthday, thank you for asking!
Please check your pings...I recognized a good suggestion and acted on it. :)
"a good suggestion---" ==> YEP.
free dixie,sw
Hmph, I thought I was on the original fraudulent-docs thread. One of these days I need to click back through all my old posts and see where that was.
History was made here on FR!
Praise be to Buckhead and to everyone at FR and LGF, etc. who helped to unravel the CBS fraud. Just try to imagine the situation if Mary Mapes, Dan Rather, Bill Burkett, “Lucy Ramirez” (HA), and friends had gotten away with that.....
Thanks BufordP.....
Can’t wait to get there and see it for myself.
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Long live Buckhead!
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