Blog-GateYes, CBS screwed up badly in ‘Memogate’ — but so did those who covered the affair

Columbia Journalism Review ^ | January 3, 2005 | Corey Pein

[MEG33]

http://www.powerlineblog.com/

"Fisking" of this article!

[MEG33]

http://www.powerlineblog.com/

[MEG33]

http://www.powerlineblog.com/
Good fisk of the article.

[steve8714]

Also how he dismissed Newcomer as a self described expert.

[steve8714]

Sure, if we read this in 2105..

[MEG33]

http://www.powerlineblog.com/

[razorback-bert]

I am enthralled by

The Evergreen State College

Olympia, WA

B.A., liberal arts -- September 2003

* Studied economics, politics and philosophy. Thesis on domestic propaganda in the war on terrorism.

[okie01]

* Studied economics, politics and philosophy. Thesis on domestic propaganda in the war on terrorism.

Earlier, I had speculated that he was young and still might be salvageable.

Evidently not.

Evergreen State and the CS of J have polluted his mind. Permanently, perhaps.

[ForGod'sSake]

Just a fine piece of slicing and dicing of young Pein's article agitprop. The sad truth is young Pein and his fellow travelers could care less and critiques will have little if any effect on their subsequent effluent. It's preaching to the choir, but it serves a purpose in giving us ammunition to be used outside the church ;^)

Their calling, as they see it, is to level the playing field between the can do's and the can't do's. The inherent unfairness of life is a scourge that can be righted by their lofty screeds against traditional hard-won values. To them, Dan Rather was only doing his part in that effort and as such should be knighted. To them the ends always justify the means, therefore, lying, cheating, stealing are all not only acceptable, but admirable, means to achieve their ill conceived, utopian dreams.

FGS

[number51]

The facts are even worse than this. CBS interviewed both Killian's son and wife prior to the airing of the story. They decided that they were too "Pro-Bush" and did not include the interviews in the story.

When rather was making his claim of "fake but accurate" he insisted that no one was challenging the underlying claims made in this story. Both Killian's son and wife challenged these claims, not to mention the commanding officer in charge at the time. In my opinion this is maybe the most blatant lie that Rather told during this entire mess.

[Christopher Lincoln]

Exactly. Pein deliberately asks the wrong question. The right question is: could you, with a 1972 government-issue typewriter, create an exact duplicate of a document created with Microsoft Word? Add two more stipulations: first, you have to do it honestly, without purpose to deceive; and second, you have to do it long before Microsoft Word was invented. To say that this is impossible is an understatement.

[Christopher Lincoln]

Pein writes:

Dan Rather trusted his producer; his producer trusted her source. And her source? Who knows.

Another "who knows" question is: is either of the first two statements true? Call me cynical if you like, but it doesn't seem likely that either Rather or Mapes is all that trusting. Also, who knows whether there was a source at all?

Also, Pein talks about Jim Moore, who says that he was told Burkett was honest. Of course it doesn't occur to Pein to doubt Moore's word, but this might be worth following up.

[kittymyrib]

Yep, Columbia Journalism School believes an 85 yr. old typist from a 1970s typing pool is an expert in this matter. What a hoot!

[Enlightiator]

Pein fails miserably as an investigative reporter, since he is one of the few in the media who hasn't been able to readily derive from reading the mountains of evidence by experts that the CBS Bush guard memo's were indeed fakes. But Pein is rather unintentionally amusing in this other article, as a not too discreet liberal writing a review of a gun mazazine...very funny stuff...

Here are some good critiques of Pein's error filled article "Blog-Gate", although it was of such poor amateurish quality, it might best have been ignored:

Memogate: The experts and the amateurs

Prove It - The Columbia Journalism Review finally confronts CBS News, Rathergate, and the blogosphere, by Jonathan V. Last

And of course the LGF and Wizbang blogs thoroughly demolish Pein's article:

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=14182_An_Inept_Smear_at_Columbia_Journalism_Review

http://wizbangblog.com/archives/004698.php

[Howlin]

Did you see this one:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1314643/posts

[Enlightiator]

I hadn't seen the thread, but I had read Pein's latest "rebuttal" nonsense on his blog site at www.coreypein.com. LGF also linked to Pein's poor rebuttals at:

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=14207_Corey_Pein-_Fake_But_Accurate

Pein sees "technical writing" instructor Prof Hailey's bogus analysis of the CBS memos as credible, compared to his suspicion of Newcomer's scholarly analysis, so Pein is a lost cause to every seeing reality.

[L.N. Smithee]

As Memogate progressed, certain talking points became conventional wisdom. Among them, that CBS’s producer, Mary Mapes, was a liberal stooge; that her source, Bill Burkett, was a lefty moonbat with an ax to grind. Both surely wanted to nail a story that Bush got preferential treatment in the National Guard. Still, there was a double standard at work. Liberals and their fellow travelers were outed like witches in Salem, while Bush’s defenders forged ahead, their affinities and possible motives largely unexamined.

It is to laugh! The onus is NOT upon those who questioned the story, it is on those who promoted the story as if it was prima facie evidence that George W. Bush was -- to coin a phrase -- unfit for command based on insubordination and preferential treatment! If indeed the memos were thoroughly inspected by legitimate experts (or, at least, if the forgeries were better), all of our charges here at FR and everywhere else would have melted away! As it turned out, Rather's "evidence" couldn't even pass muster with the few the network enlisted to cover their raspberries.

Does anybody remember that Saturday morning when Elian Gonzalez was yanked out of the arms of his extended family by armed federal agents? Hours afterward, as the Miami Cuban community protested in the streets, a photo of a beaming Elian, reunited with his estranged father and his wife, was released to the public. Matt Drudge led the charge of people who questioned the authenticity of that photograph, contrasting that one with the infamous shot of a screaming Elian cowering in a closet at gunpoint.

In the end, there was little to back up the charge that the pro-Reno/Clinton/Castro photo was Photoshopped to make him look like he was happy to be with his father. And while the revolting scheme that ripped Elian from his American family still burns in the hearts of many, no one believes that there was any forgery involved.

The author of this piece should be ashamed -- he is acting as if only old media journalists should be believed when questioning facts rather than people who haven't been "legitimized" by being deemed "experts" by the likes of Mary Mapes. And the way that he swallows the lefty kook line of thought on Buckhead and how quickly he was able to ascertain the truth shows where he is coming from -- out of left field.

Well, for all you left-fielders out there, I have a message: play deep. Rathergate is just the first of line-drives screaming your way if you keep this nonsense up.

[sevry]

Guess I'll just repost this from the other original 'bloggate' thread of I guess many repeated threads of 'Pain's 'pamphlet':

“The typewriter can do that little ‘th,’ sure it can.” He added, “I didn’t think they were forged because of the typewriter, spacing, or signature. The only reason is because of the verbiage.”

I had a few pages up just a few days into Rathergate, Corey. Sorry you missed them. Really - I am. Maybe I need to advertise more. No, that 'th' was not possible. But worse, its specific appearance in those memos was the literal default in MS Word. You had to take care to make sure it DIDN'T happen. Not with 'st', not with 'nd', but 'th'. Word default. Automatic. And it would look - just like that. And Kinko's tends to rent out computers with MS Word . . Corey. Burkett was familiar with Kinko's, apparently had an account, and it was a local meeting place for the Dems in the area.

Fact is, Corey, you can line up almost letter for letter the CBS memos and the same text quickly typed into MS Word with the default settings. Line spacing - a match. Word boundries - a match. Heck, every letter - a match. It's not a coincidence. You can't do that with an IBM Composer, which did have a closely similar font in one of its typeballs. Those with Composers tried it themselves, Corey. Letter and line spacing were different. MS Word - spot on match. And no one would even have used a typesetter like that for a memo like that.

So you must argue that the initial representations were precisely wrong. Killian didn't use a typewriter, but a PC and dumped the result to a laserprinter. And he wrote as someone unfamiliar with the jargon, or as someone trying to piece it together from scraps. That might make sense if the date were 1992. But it wasn't. It was 1972. And Microsoft hadn't been founded. Laserprinters were probably not yet even a thing of the labs (I don't know). Windowing metaphors were still themselves a thing of the labs, namely PARC. If it could only have been a typewriter, and the only typewriter of that era didn't match the memos, and the PC you can rent with MS Word at the local Kinko's, in 2004, did - then Corey . . . use that brain cell. What does it tell you, Mr. Pain?