Useful idiots
He believed in useful idiots like Jay Currie
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Blogs v. 60 Minutes
By Jay Currie Published 09/10/2004
The CBS news program Sixty Minutes II ran a story on September 8th bringing to light a set of memos which purported to show that when President Bush was in the National Guard he failed to obey orders. Liberal blogger Josh Marshall framed this revelation thusly:
"But aside from orders that contravene the laws of war, the Geneva Conventions or the US constitution, I don't think an officer or an enlisted man is allowed to disobey an order just because he comes up with some logic by which he decides the order doesn't really make sense. An order is an order, right?"
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Pretty damning stuff. Just one problem -- there is mounting evidence collected by the blogosphere that the documents were forgeries. And not very good forgeries at that.
A lot of bloggers are designers and computer geeks. People who pay attention to things like proportional spacing, kerning, superscript text and the other features of modern word processing. Guess what? A letter by letter comparison of one of the purported memos with a version typed in Microsoft Word by Charles Johnson at the blog Little Green Footballs reveals:
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"The type in the document is KERNED. Kerning is the typesetter's art of spacing various letters in such a manner that they are 'grouped' for better readability. Word processors do this automatically. NO TYPEWRITER CAN PHYSICALLY DO THIS.
"To explain: the letter 'O' is curved on the outside. A letter such as 'T' has indented space under its cross bar. On a typewriter if one types an 'O' next to a 'T' then both letters remain separated by their physical space. When you type the same letters on a computer next to each other the are automatically 'kerned' or 'grouped' so that their individual spaces actually overlap. e. g., TO. As one can readily see the curvature of the 'O' nestles neatly under the cross bar of the 'T'. Two good kerning examples in the alleged memo are the word 'my' in the second line where 'm' and 'y' are neatly kerned and also the word 'not' in the fourth line where the 'o' and 't' overlap empty space. A typewriter doesn't 'know' what particular letter is next to another and can't make those types of aesthetic adjustments."
The Weekly Standard published a story with comments from a number of typography experts all of which suggest the memos are a hoax. Radio host and blogger Hugh Hewitt interviews a document examination expert and, unsurprisingly, on point after point the expert is convinced the memos are forgeries.
Most importantly, because it breaks out of the blogosphere, the Associated Press is now on the story, albeit from a different angle:
"Gary Killian, who served in the Guard with his father and retired as a captain in 1991, said one of the memos, signed by his father, appeared legitimate. But he doubted his father would have written another, unsigned memo which said there was pressure to 'sugar coat' Bush's performance review.
"'It just wouldn't happen,' he said. 'The only thing that can happen when you keep secret files like that are bad things. ... No officer in his right mind would write a memo like that.'"
One day. That was all it took for the ranks of citizen journalists to swarm and then thoroughly discredit a story which ran in the New York Times, the Boston Globe and on a network news magazine.
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From the perspective of the establishment media, this, too, is a disaster. CBS will have to explain: where did the documents come from? What were the bona fides of the source? Who was the source? Which expert looked at the documents? How closely?
Those are the starter questions. The more basic question is how could a rabble of bloggers, in one day, provide hard core proof of forgery when major news organizations took those documents at face value? Most fundamental of all, why did the New York Times, the Boston Globe and CBS allow themselves to be used for such a transparent attempt to slander President Bush? Out in the blogosphere there are a swarm of people rooting for the answers.
Currie, if he had bothered to do any research, would have found out:
A: The LGF boys know little, if anything, about computers, typography or typewriters.
B: They made an amateur's mistake in comparing reduced size fonts when most experts start at 36 point to do their comparison. Blow up the Killian letters to 36 point and the evidence of it being typed would stand out, since they don't have an even baseline.
C: As other people point out, Word doesn't use kerning, you have to turn it on, and most professionals would do that in InDesign/PageMaker/Quark. Ask Johnson has he used some of those programs. I doubt it, since he doesn't mention them. Word can do a lot, badly, which is why pros use a design program for typesetting.
D: The Globe has confirmed the following facts: the font, Times Roman, was available for IBM machines as early as 1941, porportional type was also available, and such a document could have been produced on such a machine. Now short of all that, and only relying on the right blogs, including the openly racist LGF, Currie looks like a total asshole here.
Of course, the White House doesn't deny the provenance of these letters, but why let facts get in the way of a good story.
I found this particular bit of idiocy Linked on Blogger's home page. So besides innundating Tech Central with more e-mail than they have been flooded with, why not send Google's bosses a little note asking why they're promoting this story on their website.
Why would someone bother to forge such a pointless letter, instead of something accusing Bush of being drunk on duty, something far more serious? If you're going to lie, why lie in half measures?
Here's their corporate PR contacts. Let them know how much you loved this story being highlighted on Blogger and how accurate you thought it was. And wht they didn't link to any sites backing the documents.
Corporate PR
David Krane
+1.650.623.4096
david@google.com"
Corporate PR
Steve Langdon
+1.650.623.4950
slangdon@google.com
I'm sure this newly public company would love to hear from potential investors and concerned citizens.
posted by Steve @ 11:42:00 AM
