Les Jones

Media Behaving Badly > C BS. C BS Run. Run, C BS, Run (Part 5)

New York Observer interview with Dan Rather.

CBS had a lame statement today concerning the documents. Here's the transcript.

SayUncle finds this cryptic text in the transcript:

^We estab^lish^ed to ^our s^ati^sfaction that the memo^s were accurate ^or we would not have put them on television. There was a great deal o^f coroborating [sic] evidence ^from people in a position to know.

WizBang has the much more informative letter CBS sent to its affiliates. It includes the name of the previously-undisclosed document examiner, James J. Pierce. It also includes this statement: "Two of the examiners, Mssrs. Matley and Pierce, attested and continue to attest to their belief in the documents' authenticity. (see attachments 1 and 2)." That's a lie, as Matley has already told the Washington Post:

"There's no way that I, as a document expert, can authenticate them," Marcel Matley said in a telephone interview from San Francisco. The main reason, he said, is that they are "copies" that are "far removed" from the originals.

UPDATE THE SAME DAY: Beldar notes that CBS had previously told Fox News they had five experts. Who's the fourth fifth expert?

More on Marcel Matley.

It turns out that Marcel Matley, CBS' so-called "expert" who said the signatures on National Guard files obtained by the network are real, is not certified by the American Board of Forensic Document Examiners, has had no formal training in identifying either papers, inks, typewriters or photocopies, and has never been trained in a document lab or by any law enforcement entity.

Speaking of which, the Washington Times reports that a real document examiner questions Matley's assessment:

Eugene P. Hussey, a certified forensic document examiner in Washington state, said yesterday there is another flaw in the CBS memos. Mr. Hussey studied the known signatures of Col. Killian on Air Force documents, and two signatures on documents dated 1972 and 1973 that aired on "60 Minutes" Wednesday night.

"It is my limited opinion that Killian did not sign those documents," Mr. Hussey told The Washington Times. He said he uses the phrase "limited opinion" because he does not have the original documents. He, like other experts interviewed by the press, relied on copies of originals first obtained by CBS.

A Rasmussen poll find that only 27% of respondents believed the CBS documents are authentic. 38% think they're forgeries.

The Boston Herald has issued a correction for a headline that implied Bouffard had vouched for the documents.

Allah makes a strong case that CBS was "authentication shopping": showing some of their experts just some of the documents, so that a document that was ruled inauthentic by one expert wouldn't taint the other documents. As one of this commentors says, "CBS wants to believe that milk spoils by the glass rather than by the gallon."

Even the LA Times is calling the documents forgeries Via PowerLine.

CBS News has been had. It's hard to reach any other conclusion about newly discovered documents that CBS and anchor Dan Rather are defending as revealing the truth about George W. Bush's military service.

Despite Rather's statement Monday that the network "believes the documents are authentic," the evidence keeps mounting that they are not. As The Times reported, conservative bloggers detected glaring inconsistencies, such as a Microsoft Word type style. So many other discrepancies have since emerged that it would require a willful suspension of disbelief to take them as merely coincidental.

Congressional hearings are a real possibility.

Congressman Chris Cox, a member of the relevant subcommittee, just announced on my program that hearings on the CBS fraud are likely; that the source of the docs is the most pressing issue; and that CBS execs had promised in hearings conducted after the 2000 election to not allow the competitive pressures to get a story to lead to lousy news-gathering. He doubts there is enough time to hold such a hearing before the election, but allowed as how public pressure might force the subcommittee to act even in the few legislative days left to it.

Comments Around the Blogs

I want to tell the American people this: I did not have Selectrics with that man, Col. Killian.
- Tom the Barbarian comment added :: 15th September 2004, 12:15 GMT-08

The fact that we're arguing over issues in Iraq (if we should be there or not, if it is going well or as planned or not) also is very much related to the same issue. Has the MSM been leading, suggesting, inferring, selectively reporting, or outright distorting the issues in Iraq? Many of us on the right side of the aisle believe that the press has been doing that. We've never had such blatant proof of their partisanship before.

It's not a separate story. It is not irrelevant in the grand scheme of the more important issues. If we're deciding issues based on what the press tells us, and the press is a fraud, then on what basis can we discuss anything?
Posted by Mrs. du Toit September 15, 2004 02:10 PM

Posted by lesjones