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:: MAX BLACK ::
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."--C.S. Lewis
"The Swiss pocket knife of conservative thought on the web..." - Eli Kardrakian
"Bookmark Max and dump your subscription to the newspaper; if you don't have a birdcage you really don't need it anyway..." - Shirley St. James
:: Monday, September 13, 2004 ::
:: FREQUENTLY UPDATED-SCROLL DOWN ::
PajamaGate
WSJs John Fund on CBSs transgression:
I'd Rather Be Blogging
CBS stonewalls as "guys in pajamas" uncover a fraud.
"A watershed media moment occurred Friday on Fox News Channel, when Jonathan Klein, a former executive vice president of CBS News who oversaw "60 Minutes," debated Stephen Hayes, a writer for The Weekly Standard, on the documents CBS used to raise questions about George W. Bush's Vietnam-era National Guard service.
Mr. Klein dismissed the bloggers who are raising questions about the authenticity of the memos: "You couldn't have a starker contrast between the multiple layers of check and balances [at '60 Minutes'] and a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing."
He will regret that snide disparagement of the bloggers, many of whom are skilled lawyers or have backgrounds in military intelligence or typeface design. A growing number of design and document experts say they are certain or almost certain the memos on which CBS relied are forgeries."
Will Safire has probably the best retort. Instapundit has the bigger post on this NYT's editorial but I can't help posting the last word in Safire's column:
"Courage"
Ouch!
(It's refreshing to see the New York Times isn't totally in the tank--guess Rather's fraud is even too clumsy and blatant for 'the old grey lady' to stomach.)
And the American Spectator is keeping an eye on CBS 'suits':
"On Friday, according to CBS News sources, Rather spent the day on the phone and dealing with CBS suits who were nervous about the fall out from the story. "All Dan could say was that this was an attack from the right-wing nuts, and that we should have expected this, given the stakes," says a CBS News producer. "He was terribly defensive and nervous. You could tell."
{...}
PERHAPS MOST TROUBLING to the CBS News staff looking into how its story went off the rails is the timing of the memos' appearance. "Some 60 Minutes staffers have been working on this story for more than three years off and on," says the CBS News producer. "There have been rumors about these memos and what was in them for at least that long. No one had been able to find anything. Not a single piece of paper. But we know that a lot of people here interviewed a lot of people in Texas and elsewhere and asked very explicit questions about the existence of these memos. Then all of a sudden they show up? In one nice, neat package?"
I'd love to be a fly on the wall!--this is so big SOMEBODY from inside CBS will start leaking--and you'll see it all unfold in the blogosphere first. Ain't technology wonderful?
Update #1: Speaking of wonderful technology, I just found this comical bit of information Johah posted on the Corner. From the very mouth of Mr. Rather's document 'expert' Marcel (the cheap-lounge-act-magician-looking-guy) Matley:"In fact, modern copiers and computer printers are so good that they permit easy fabrication of quality forgeries. From a copy, the document examiner cannot authenticate the unseen original but may well be able to determine that the unseen original is false. Further, a definite finding of authenticity for a signature is not possible from a photocopy, while a definite finding of falsity is possible."
Attempting to authenticate a signature from a photocopy is exactly what Matley did for CBS. Game over.
Yikes...Rather's a bigger idiot than even I thought for not having checked this guy out--and he has the nerve to disparage BLOGGERS for their lack of 'checks and balances? WOW.
Update #2: INDC Journal is still pulling the strings out of Rather's magic whole-cloth--here's a thread:
"I am one of the pioneers of electronic typesetting. I was doing work with computer typesetting technology in 1972 (it actually started in late 1969), and I personally created one of the earliest typesetting programs for what later became laser printers, but in 1970 when this work was first done, lasers were not part of the electronic printer technology (my way of expressing this is “I was working with laser printers before they had lasers”, which is only a mild stretch of the truth).
...
The probability that any technology in existence in 1972 would be capable of producing a document that is nearly pixel-compatible with Microsoft’s Times New Roman font and the formatting of Microsoft Word, and that such technology was in casual use at the Texas Air National Guard, is so vanishingly small as to be indistinguishable from zero.
(Emphasis mine)
The evidence for fraud is simply overwhelming--although I swore I'd never watch CBS again, I'll likely tune-in tonight just to see the 'deer-in-the-headlights' look in Rather's bloodshot eyes.
:: Max 9:11 AM [+] ::
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