Les Jones

Media Behaving Badly > C BS. C BS Run. Run, C BS, Run (Part 4)

Killian's former secretary says the CBS documents are fakes.

Two document experts hired to examine the documents before last Wednesday's broadcast warned CBS that the documents they were about to air were probably forgeries.

Emily Will, a veteran document examiner from North Carolina, told ABC News she saw problems right away with the one document CBS hired her to check the weekend before the broadcast.

"I found five significant differences in the questioned handwriting, and I found problems with the printing itself as to whether it could have been produced by a typewriter," she said.

Will says she sent the CBS producer an e-mail message about her concerns and strongly urged the network the night before the broadcast not to use the documents.

"I told them that all the questions I was asking them on Tuesday night, they were going to be asked by hundreds of other document examiners on Thursday if they ran that story," Will said.

"I told them that all the questions I was asking them on Tuesday night, they were going to be asked by hundreds of other document examiners on Thursday if they ran that story," Will said.

But the documents became a key part of the 60 Minutes II broadcast questioning President Bush's National Guard service in 1972. CBS made no mention that any expert disputed the authenticity.

"I did not feel that they wanted to investigate it very deeply," Will told ABC News...

A second document examiner hired by CBS News, Linda James of Plano, Texas, also told ABC News she had concerns about the documents and could not authenticate them.

"I did not authenticate anything and I don't want it to be misunderstood that I did," James said. "And that's why I have come forth to talk about it because I don't want anybody to think I did authenticate these documents."

A third examiner hired by CBS for its story, Marcel Matley, appeared on CBS Evening News last Friday and was described as saying the document was real.

According to The Washington Post, Matley said he examined only the signature attributed to Killian and made no attempt to authenticate the documents themselves.

Marcel Matley: signature expert or palm reader?

In "Spirituality in Handwriting," Matley assesses a woman's "libidinal energy" based on her handwriting.

"She has an excellent and rich animate nature with a healthy, instinctual libidinal energy which, when integrated, will propel her into dynamic and fruitful activity and self-fulfillment," Matley wrote in 1989.

More on Matley:

In addition, in a 1995 California court deposition obtained by The Post, Matley acknowledged that he had no formal training in a document lab, in identification of papers, inks or "machines, typewriters, photocopies." He also acknowledged he'd had no training from the U.S. Secret Service, FBI, U.S. Army, California Department of Justice or any other law-enforcement body.

Matley didn't respond to messages left for him.

CBS spokeswoman Sandy Genelius said the network regards Matley as a reputable handwriting expert but declined to say why they chose him.

How CBS's Mike Wallace got taken in by a phony Vietnam vet's story.

For anyone hasn't seen it, Corante dissects Richard Katz's claims about ones and lowercase Ls.

Comments Around the Blogs

I'm beginning to think that showing the "old"/new memo comparison to some people is like showing a dinosaur fossil to a Creationist. The eyes see, but the mind will not receive. (If there are any Creationists reading this, I didn't mean you. Please don't blow up the abortion clinic I run.)
Posted by: Jim Treacher at September 14, 2004 at 12:36 PM

The only thing that would have made that Dan Rather CYA piece more surreal is if he asked that guy, "So Bill, are you a forensic document expert?" No Dan, But I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.
Posted by: JLogan at September 14, 2004 at 01:13 PM