Posted on 09/24/2013 1:14:08 PM PDT by Slings and Arrows
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24. Power Line
From practically the day they sprang into existence, blogs have been denigrated as trivial, inaccurate, and derivative. Untrained writers could never match the accuracy and depth of newspapers and network news. Power Line, a scrappy right-wing blog, turned that perception on its ear when it took down one of old media’s most venerable figures: Dan Rather.
In September 2004, Rather and CBS News aired an explosive story about George W. Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard. The report used military documents to show that Bush had received preferential treatment and performed poorly while failing to meet his service obligations. Just two months before Bush came up for reelection, the report was a bombshell.
Or it would have been, except the documents weren’t authentic. Power Line cofounder Scott W. Johnson thought something seemed fishy, and, thanks to tips from Power Line readers, it took him only a few hours to expose the critical documents as forgeries. The Internet’s self-taught experts had proved to be more reliable fact-checkers than the traditional elite in CBS’s news department. As the scandal erupted, Rather resigned from CBS, and even stalwarts like Time hailed Power Line’s meticulous work. Score one for new media.
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(Excerpt) Read more at mentalfloss.com ...
Well, don’t want to discredit PowerLine for their contributions, but some of us know the truth of what happened that night.
See Buckhead’s post no 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
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1210662/replies?c=47
Fair enough, but she got it REALLY wrong - enough so that my paranoid genes are starting to kick in.
We do indeed know the truth.
Buckhead
you beat me
I miss Howlin. (sigh)
I remember.
Yep, and one of the players who furnished them the forged documents was Bill Burkett. At one point in time, he and I worked at the same company. We were both outside salesmen for the company. I was in NM at the time and he was in Texas.
The transfer of information happened in Abilene, TX. It is my recollection it was sent to the Kinko’s there.
One of the other player’s was Rather’s daughter.
There was another player from San Antonio, don’t remember her name.
All Deep ComDem Operatives.
mmmmm....coppers....
I remember that night and that thread, I even considered signing up that night but the information, input, and opinions kept outstripping the tiny input I had related to my few months as an Army clerk during the period in question, so I remained a lurker.
I saw it as a freerepublic event, something that was emerging and unfolding from freerepublic, not just something that an individual was posting or had posted. I had to attend a club meeting that night and couldn't wait to get back home to my computer and watch the flow of information.
*""That was the first blow, from which all the others followed. Several FReepers in the Pajama Posse researched the matter further on a series of threads that night, to be joined by a number of bloggers, among them Ratherbiased.com, PowerLineBlog.com, LittleGreenFootballs.com and Instapundit.com. (The term blog derives from Web log. I believe Pajama Posse is a facetious reference to FReepers who do research on the Internet while in their pajamas. While some FReepers are lawyers and current or former journalists -- the late Barbara Olson was a FReeper, though not an active one -- many of its best researchers are simply bright, hard-nosed civilians with a modem and a large library.)""*
Just saying that Adrian Chen is the idiot, not John Hindraker. I haven’t seen his name around recently, but he was really excellent back then, and was among those who were quoted on FR all the time.
The strength of FR is in the world wide reporting base, like in the case of the shuttle disaster.
Having been in the Army in the ‘70’s and having seen many, many typewritten memos, I knew something was wrong with the Rather documents. Buckhead spotted the precise technical problem. I remember that being one of the best days ever to be a member of this forum.
Understood.
FWIW there were many of us who immediately noted the alleged memo had to be a forgery, because the Air National Guard typewriters did not use such tpefaces and the NAG did not use such document formatting. At the time the forged memos were supposed to have been written, I was giving briefings to the pilots, including pilots from Bush’s fighter-interceptor group. I know from first hand experience that our typewriters could not have been used to type those memos. I cannot speak for Bush’s unit, but they supposedly get the same typewriters from the same Air Force supplies as our own. Many of us were discussing this forgery of the alleged memorandums on USENET forums and Web forums as soon as CBS showed images of the memos. It seemed insane for CBS to have made its claims when commonsense users of the typewriters immediately recognized the absurdity of the CBS claims.
Never heard of most of ‘em.
To me something great about FR is unraveling things, collecting information like we did against Rather, and Mitt Romney, and countless other stories and politicians.
It is nice when you start posting a collection of facts and then see them reflected in articles and posts around the net.
We know that FR has served as show prep for figures like Rush Limbaugh.
There is certainly a strong collaborative strand present here too.
Some group has to do show prep.
It was none of the above that put the stake in Dan Rather’s heart.
It was some of Bush’s fellow pilots who refuted the Rather documents based on their own experiences and knowledge of the players involved - Killian, Bush, Mrs. Carr, Lt. Strong.
These were the guys who Rather and Mapes deliberately avoided contacting since they would expose the truth. Those guys knew the regulations involved, Killian’s habits, the actual events, the ANG procedures and processes. They tried to bring up the issues to the media, but were not allowed time by the MSNBC, CNN, ABC, CBS,Obama supporters. Only Fox gave them some face time.
The Powerline and FreeRepublic pointed out the typewriter issues, which, though valid, could not by themselves refute Rather’s contention that even if the memos were false, the facts were true.
Ironically, those pilots were there and available to the Bush people to refute the memos, but Bush’s aides like Bartlett and Rove (the Architect) refused to use them and tried to wing it on their own. They were just as ignorant as Rather and Mapes, but refused to admit it, and in the process almost gave substance to the Rather claim.
Nobody - Buckhead, Johnson, Howlin, TankerKC - outside those who were actually there could have killed the Rather accusations on there own, because they didn’t know the intimate details involved. Like the Texas ANG DID have a proportional spacing typewriter - but not in Houston, but in Austin, 160 miles away, where it was used to type award certificates to make them look nice. Jerry Killian wan nowhere near it. The proportionally spaced document that Mapes used in her book as “proof” that the Texas ANG had them was the one at the State Headquarters in Austin used for certificate making.
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