CBS media political cartoon.
It’s the curlies, stupid!
Well, as it turns out, the Bush National Guard smoking gun memos find is a
hoax – and a big one at that. Dan Rather and CBS apparently didn’t do much
‘authenticating’ before rushing to report the memos as factual. The
NationalReviewOnline column “Kerry Spot” has some Rather [pun
intended] damning observations by computer document forensics expert Bruce
Webster:
Kerry Spot reader Bruce Webster who has as served as
an expert witness in U.S. District Court cases regarding computer
document forensics, writes in that the CBS News document "has all sorts of
problems... The typefaces weren't available on typewriters in 1973."
The typefaces listed and linked below, by the way, do not have “curly”
quotes, only "straight" ones. Oddly, you'll notice the CBS documents, like
the Kerry Spot, have both, sometimes in the same document. (On the Kerry
Spot, this is a result of transferring text from a word processing program
into web-publishing program Moveable Type. (A link using curly quotes won't
link correctly, which means every link has to be checked to make sure it has
the right kind of quotes.)
CBS had better have one heck of a defense for this.
ABC News is running this story on the memos authenticity: "Son of Late
Officer Questions Bush Memos"
And this report, filed for The Weekly Standard by staff writer Stephen F.
Hayes :
There are several reasons these experts are skeptical of the authenticity of
the Killian memos. First the typographic spacing is proportional, as is
routine with professional typesetting and computer typography, not monospace,
as was common in typewriters in the 1970s. (In proportional type, thin
letters like "i" and "l" are spaced closer together than thick letters like
"W" and "M". In monospace, all the letter widths are the same.)
Second, the font appears to be identical to the Times New Roman font that is
the default typeface in Microsoft Word and other modern word processing
programs. According to Flynn, the font is not listed in the Haas Atlas--the
definitive encyclopedia of typewriter type fonts.
Third, the apostrophes are curlicues of the sort produced by word processors
on personal computers, not the straight vertical hashmarks typical of
typewriters. Finally, in some references to Bush's unit--the 111thFighter
Interceptor Squadron--the "th" is a superscript in a smaller size than the
other type. Again, this is typical (and often done automatically) in modern
word processing programs. Although several experts allow that such a
rendering might have been theoretically possible in the early 1970s, it
would have been highly unlikely. Superscripts produced on typewriters--the
numbers preceding footnotes in term papers, for example--were almost always
in the same size as the regular type.
So can we say with absolute certainty that the documents were forged? Not
yet. Xavier University's Polt, in an email, offers two possible scenarios.
"Either these are later transcriptions of earlier documents (which may have
been handwritten or typed on a typewriter), or they are crude and amazingly
foolish forgeries. I'm a Kerry supporter myself, but I won't let that cloud
my objective judgment: I'm 99% sure that these documents were not produced
in the early 1970s."
Says Flynn: "This looks pretty much like a hoax at this point in time."
CBS, in a statement Thursday afternoon, said it stands by the story. The
network claims that its own document expert concluded the memos were
authentic. There are several things CBS could do to clear up any confusion:
(1) Provide the name of the expert who authenticated the documents for
Sixty Minutes.
(2) Provide the original documents to outside experts--William Flynn, Gerald
Reynolds, and Peter Tytell seem to be the consensus top three in the United
States--for further analysis.
(3) Provide more information on the source of the documents.
(A spokeswoman for CBS, Kelly Edwards, said she was overwhelmed with phone
calls and did not respond to specific requests for comment.)
[NOTE: You can see the memos for yourself on the CBS website:
here,
here,
here, and
here.]