Posted on 09/08/2021 7:10:28 AM PDT by T Ruth
On September 8, 2004, CBS’s “60 Minutes” used forged government documents as the basis for a story that attacked the military record of then-President George W. Bush. It was bad enough that CBS used forged government documents, but what made it worse was that CBS aired this story during the presidential election and timed the airing to coincide with the rollout of Democrat John Kerry’s “favorite son” campaign theme. CBS thus provided the “news” upon which the Democrat candidate based his attack ads. The CBS story was quickly disproven and eventually forced CBS into personnel changes and investigations. Dan Rather was forced into retirement a few months later. But CBS did not give up before a lengthy battle in which bloggers demonstrated that the font and other features in the forged documents did not exist in 1972 (the date placed on the forgeries).
The battle over the truth became a story in itself. The truth about the font spread like wildfire through the blogosphere and the internet, quickly picking up steam. CBS, Rather and the left clung to their story as long as they could. They even invented the “fake but accurate” standard to defend the forged documents. CBS and its surrogates belittled the bloggers but ended up making them famous. Conservative bloggers would embrace the “pajamas” epithet thrown at them during the battle – some of whom still use it today. With persistence, they established that CBS was wrong. The documents were forgeries, and CBS personnel committed misconduct in airing the story. Investigations and lawsuits and an independent panel followed.
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*** Rathergate serves as one example of what the establishment media do. They lie. They lie regularly, and they lie during election years to help elect Democrats. (bolding added)
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(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
I see a typo, but much more. My point was that was the first time that I saw the media flat-out lie to try to swing an election (which is par for the course now)...and the reason they felt they had to stick with their lie was the millions of people who they didn’t want to cut loose (as they did in 1980s, when they hammered Carter non-stop).
Thanks for the link.
Reasonable?! That's a stretch! Maybe "theoretically possible," at best. Way too much money for Guard memos. And the secretary said she didn't type that memo anyway, and she was the only one who typed Killian's memos.
it would not be unusual for a high ranking officer to have had some extra money in the budget to spend and buy something extravagant, like a high end IBM typewriter
Yet no evidence that he did actually buy such a rare typewriter, and lots of evidence that he did not.
And in addition to proportional font, the other glaring defect in the fraudulently created memo was the superscripted "th" following a number.
Methinks thou dost protest too much. It was a slam-dunk case of fraud that ended several "journalism" careers.
I don’t think those explanations are necessarily in opposition. Moreso a weighing of which was prominent.
Aside from that I understood your question as an invitation to speculate, not as a quiz. :)
Good point...you didn’t read my mind, but we’re still on the same page.
I eventually figured out the typo. The error was in a different place than I was initially trying to figure out, so I was just looking for a clarification so we could proceed.
Thanks to the creation and growth of the internet, the news media is being exposed and caught in their lies literally on a daily basis, and within hours, minutes after their lying broadcasts.
Imagine, if Rather and CBS had tried pulling this stunt only about ten or less years earlier, they would have completely gotten away with it. God only knows what lies and how often they got away with years before Rathergate.
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