Les Jones

Media Behaving Badly > C BS. C BS Run. Run, C BS, Run (Part 2)

Patterico puts to rest a ABC/MediaMatters/NPR conspiracy theory that says criticism of the documents began before the 60 Minutes episode ended. In reality, ABC didn't notice that the 8:59 timestamp was Pacific time, and was therefore posted almost three hours after the show ended. MediaMatters and NPR just repeated the mistake.

Just a few days ago the DNC's Terry Mcaulife heralded the CBS documents as proof that Bush shirked his guard duties.

Tonight's CBS New report made clear that President Bush has misrepresented the nature of his National Guard service for decades to the American people. And now that questions are being raised, only Bush can settle this once and for all by answering the unanswered questions about his Guard service.

Mcaulife is now suggesting that the documents are forgeries planted by Republicans.

I can unequivocally say that no one involved here at the Democratic National Committee had anything at all to do with any of those documents. If I were an aspiring young journalist, I think I would ask Karl Rove that question.

So Mcaulife now acts as if the documents are maybe, possibly forgeries planted by the Republicans. That hasn't stopped John Edwards from calling on Bush to answer charges in memos. Is anybody running that campaign?

Sensing, by the way, thinks the documents are inconsistent with military documents.

The officer who was supposedly putting pressure on Killian to "sugarcoat" Bush's service retired the year before:

The man named in a disputed memo as exerting pressure to "sugar coat" President Bush's military record left the Texas Air National Guard a year and a half before the memo was supposedly written, his own service record shows.

An order obtained by The Dallas Morning News shows that Col. Walter "Buck" Staudt was honorably discharged on March 1, 1972. CBS News reported this week that a memo in which Staudt was described as interfering with officers' negative evaluations of Bush's service, was dated Aug. 18, 1973.

Typing Class

DefeatJohnJohn slogged through the IBM Selectric Composer manual. Conclusion? It could make superscripts and subscripts, but couldn't reduce the size of the superscripted and subscripted letters, as seen in the CBS Killian document.

DefeatJohnJohn is offering a $10,000 reward for anyone who can reproduce the Killian memo with a typewriter from the period.

WizBang points to the Selectric Typewriter Museum, which has this to say:

For those who want my opinion...the documents appear to be done in Word, and then copied repeatedly to make them "fuzzy". They use features that were not available on office typewriters the 1970s, specifically the combination of proportional spacing with superscript font. The IBM Executive has proportional spacing, but used fixed type bars. The Selectric has changeable type elements, but fixed spacing (some models could be selected at 10 or 12 pitch, but that's all). The Selectric Composer was not an office typewriter, but apparently did use proportional spacing. These were very expensive machines, used by printing offices, not administrative offices.

Charles Johnson notes that several lines in some of the documents are centered in a way that was impossible with most typewriters from the era. One exception: the Selectric Composer might have been able to do that, but it required each line to be typed twice, and it seems unlikely someone in the military would go to that trouble for a memo. Here's more on the Composer and the process of creating centered lines. That link also has an attempt to reproduce the memo using a Composer.