Les Jones

NPR and O'Reilly

Arch liberal Terry Gross of NPR's Fresh Air interviews arch conservative Bill O'Reilly of Fox News's O'Reilly Factor. O'Reilly walks out of the interview. NPR's Ombudsman takes O'Reilly's side, criticizing Gross for a hostile atmosphere and an empty chair interview after O'Reilly walked out. Jay Rosen says O'Reilly won.

Bonus! NPR's Blooper Reel. Geez, Garrison, do you eat Powdermilk biscuits with that filthy mouth?

Double Live Platinum Bonus! Read Terry Gross's interview with Gene Simmons of KISS.

Gross: I'd like to think the personality you presented on our show today is a persona that you've affected as a member of KISS, but that you're not nearly as obnoxious when you're at home or with friends.

Simmons: Fair enough, and I'd like to think that the boring lady who's talking to me now is a lot sexier and more interesting than the one's who's doing NPR, studious and reserved.

CBS's Supposed National Guard Documents are Forgeries

CBS unveiled some documents that were supposed to invalidate Bush's claims of attendance in the National Guard. Problem is, at least one of the documents if forged.

The Killian document was supposedly typed in 1972, but lots of people noticed that it looked like it was produced with word-processing software. For instance, the document uses smart quotes, and a superscript "th" in "187th." Little Green Footballs put the final nail in the coffin. Charles Johnson was able to reproduce the document exactly using the default settings in Microsoft Word.

"I opened Microsoft Word, set the font to Microsoft�s Times New Roman, tabbed over to the default tab stop to enter the date �18 August 1973,� then typed the rest of the document purportedly from the personal records of the late Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian.

And my Microsoft Word version, typed in 2004, is an exact match for the documents trumpeted by CBS News as �authentic.�

I followed those instructions in my copy of Microsoft Word and got the same result. CBS was taken in by an obvious forgery. I anxiously await their retraction.

UPDATE SEPTEMBER 10: Johnson posted a scan of a printout of the page, and it's an even better match. Link.The "th" doesn't look right on screen, but when printed it's an exact match for the CBS Killian document. His animated GIF with the two files overlaid is below. Does CBS really think this degree of similarity between a modern Word doc and an alleged 1972 typewritten document is a coincidence?

C BS. C BS Run. Run, C BS, Run!

Rumor is that Dan Rather will talk more about the Killian document tonight on the CBS News, and try to prove that a 1973 typewriter could have produced the document. My TiVo is already programmed to record it.

INDC has led the way on the document questioning front. Go there and keep scrolling.

If the document's fake, whodunit? If called out as a fake, the document hurts Kerry. Let's see... If not called out as a fake, the document hurts Bush. Who benefits either way? Hillary Clinton.

What to call the forged document meltdown at CBS? Lots of people are calling it Ra^thergate. If you don't like that one, visit Pennywit and vote in the poll.

In other news, the Commissar found authentic documents that prove Kerry was in Cambodia.

CBS Sportsline got taken in by a forged document and mistakenly reported that Washington Redskins running back Clinton Portis would sit out 8-12 weeks with a herniated disk. Via WizBang.

Joshua Micah Kennedy Onasis Jingleheimer Schmidt Marshall has doubts about the documents, as does Kevin Drum. (LATER: so does Matthew Yglesias.) Kevin at Leanleft didn't have any doubts, and then he did, and then he drank some more Kool-Aid and he now he doesn't again.

Gotta love this post from the comments at Roger Simon's. You know who verified the documents for CBS, right?

Just remember the end scene from original Indiana Jones movie (analysing the ark):

Government Man: Top People
Indy: Who?
Government Man: Top People.

Now doesn't CBS sound strangely familiar...

More after the 6:30 CBS News.

Dan's Rather Lame Response

That took longer than I thought to blog because I had to make dinner in between my last post and this one.

Rather was in siege mode. Cover-up time. CYA, just like the Killian document.

Rather started by characterizing the questions about the CBS report as attacks. He then re-iterated all of the charges against Bush regarding his National Guard service, a repeat which took 40 seconds and previewed what was to come.

"Today on the Internet and elsewhere, including many who were partisan political operatives, concentrated on the key questions of the overall story, but on the documents that were part of the support of the story."

Partisan political operatives? That's funny, I don't recall cashing any checks from Karl Rove. Translation: the jury didn't believe the witness, so they ignored the witness's testimony. Therefore CBS is going to claim the jury was rigged.

Rather showed some other Bush military records that included a superscript. However, the superscript on those authentic documents was noticably different: it was vertically centered with the other letters on the line. The superscript on the CBS Killian document was raised considerably above the line of text. That didn't seem to bother Baghdad Dan. UPDATE: Brian Carnell has a screen capture: go see for yourself.

Next, Rather sat up a straw man, saying that some people claimed the Times New Roman font wasn't available in 1973. True, some people have said that. And Rather noted that one company had produced the font since 1931. But that would most likely have been for typesetters rather than typewriters. He was basically right, but it's a weak point. He failed to address the curly quotes in the document, or the use of centering on other documents, or the striking resemblance between the Killian document and the same document produced using the default settings in Microsoft Word.

"Document and handwriting expert" Marcel Matley was brought out as an expert witness for the documents. "He says he believes they are real, but is concerned about exactly what is being examined by some people now questioning the documents. Because deterioration occurs each time a document is reproduced, and the documents being analyzed outside of CBS have been photocopied, faxed, scanned, and downloaded, and are far removed from the documents CBS started with, which were also photocopies."

UPDATE: RatherBiased found this quote from Matley: "The Problem with Copies: Do not passively accept a copy as the sole basis of a case. Every copy, intentionally or unintentionally, is in some way false to the original. In fact, modern copiers and computer printers are so good that they permit easy fabrication of quality forgeries." You don't say! "Further, a definite finding of authenticity for a signature is not possible from a photocopy, while a definite finding of falsity is possible." Ya think he told CBS that?

An obvious point is that most people questioning the documents are using the PDFs that CBS News posted on their Web site. Computer files are digital: they do not suffer any degradation when downloaded. I can't imagine that any of the bloggers questioning these documents scanned or faxed them. The only scanning done was by CBS News, who scanned the photos and placed the PDFs online.

The next part of the segment focused on Matley's analyis of Jerry Killian's signature. What's the point? If the documents were digitally forged, the signature is meaningless. Anyone forging a document would find a copy of the person's signature, scan it, and paste it into the document. The fact that CBS News has a photocopy of the document rather than the original makes the signature meaningless.

DAN RATHER: When you read through these documents, is there any doubt in your mind that these are genuine?

ROBERT STRONG: They are compatible with the way business was done at that time. They are compatible with the man that I remember Jerry Killian being. I don't see anything in the documents that are discordant with what were the times, what were the situation, and what were the people involved.

DAN RATHER: (Voiceover) Strong says the highly charged political atmosphere of the guard at the time was perfectly represented in the newly-revealed documents.

ROBERT STRONG: It verged on outright corruption. In terms of the favors that were done, the power that was traded. And it was unconscienable, from a moral and ethical perspective it was unconscienable.

OK, but while that confirms some people's beliefs about Bush's service, it really does nothing to authenticate the documents. The fact that a document panders to a viewpoint doesn't authenticate the document.

"It is the information in the new documents that is most compelling for people familair with President Bush's record in the National Guard. Author Jim Moore has written two books critical of President Bush and his service in the guard."

Well, Moore's certainly an unbiased source, isn't he?

"If any definitive evidence to the contrary of our story is found, we will report it."

I feel reassured. Don't you?

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.

C BS. C BS Run. Run, C BS, Run (Part 3)

Wizbang looks at Marty Heldt as a possible source for the CBS documents.

The reward for re-creating the CBS documents with a 1972 typewriter is up to $37,900. And there's a new cartoon.

There's no reward for re-creating the documents using Microsoft Word because it's so ridiculously easy. Here are the instructions and copy-and-paste text so you can try it at home. Two quick tips for homebrewers: put two spaces at the end of sentences, and print the document for the superscript th to look right (it looks totally different printed than it does onscreen).

This morning's USA Today article moves the story forward by quoting several document experts who pronounced the CBS documents phonies. Beldar notes the two extra pages in USA Today's version of the documents. The paper says it obtained its documents "independently soon after the 60 Minutes segment aired Wednesday, from a person with knowledge of Texas Air National Guard operations."

An amazing Flash animation comparing the CBS documents with the same documents produced in Microsoft Word. They're forgeries, folks.

More on letter spacing in the CBS documents. This page looks at the CBS docs and finds definite word spacing anomalies that are uncharacteristic of any typewriter. His analysis is based on the fact that Microsoft Word spaces certain letters pairs (such as at) not at all or to a lesser degree when presented in the opposite order (such as ta). The CBS docs follow the same spacing pattern found in the Microsoft Word document.

Jane Galt:

What's with the anonymous experts? I've never heard of such a thing. Anonymous sources, sure, but document examiners aren't like priests or employees -- they expect to testify about what they do. That's what they get paid for. How come CBS's won't come forward? Are they really that afraid of Karl Rove's Special Document Examiner Hit Squad?

UPDATE SEPTEMBER 14: The "document and handwriting expert" (he is the latter but not the former) CBS News used to authenticate the signature on one document has said he does not and cannot authenticate the documents themselves because they're photocopies.

The lead expert retained by CBS News to examine disputed memos from President Bush's former squadron commander in the National Guard said yesterday that he examined only the late officer's signature and made no attempt to authenticate the documents themselves.

"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.

Meanwhile, CBS News is now putting forth Bill Glennon as a "document expert." He's no such thing. He was a typewriter repairman for IBM and even he says "I don�t claim to be a typewriter expert". Actually, what he says is "I don�t claim to be a typewriter expert but after working on IBM typewriters for IBM for over 13 years in a high call area like NYC I can tell you without a doubt that the Model D can produce those documents." Then why not go collect the reward?

I'll close with these thoughts from Powerline:

Before September 11, important aspects of our security arrangements were based on the assumption that people, even terrorists, want to live. For example, airlines followed the rule that if a passenger's bags were checked but the person failed to appear for the flight, his bags would be removed from the airplane. The idea was that a bomb could have been planted in the luggage. But as long as the passenger was on the airplane, it was assumed that his bags were safe, since no one -- it was thought -- would blow up an airplane with himself on it. After September 11, security arrangements were changed to take into account the new reality (or newly recognized reality) of the suicide bomber.

...

Very few Americans are news junkies. Most people will probably never know about the CBS scandal, or will never have enough information to form a judgment about it. For that matter, most don't care. But within the news business, and inside the relatively small slice of the American population where sophisticated consumers of the news dwell, everyone knows, already, that Dan Rather and CBS News tried to influence the November election by telling lies and publishing forged documents. CBS has been disgraced among its peers.

The fact that CBS was willing to barter away what remained of its reputation in exchange for an opportunity to help the John Kerry campaign requires us to re-examine our assumptions about the mainstream media, just as the emergence of the suicide bomber required us to re-examine certain assumptions about security. We never thought that a vast, powerful broadcast network would destroy its own reputation for political gain. Now we know that it can happen.

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

Dan's Rather Lame Response (Part 2)

I watched the CBS News tonight and noticed something about the report on the document controversy. CBS didn't let Dan Rather do the reporting. Wyatt Andrews did the reporting. CBS management is asserting itself and reigning in Rather before their credibility disappears completely.

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

C BS. C BS Run. Run, C BS, Run (Part 6)

Is Bill Burkett the Source of the Forged Memos?

The must-read article today is by Michael Dobbs at the Washington Post.

Robert Strong, who was one of three people interviewed by "60 Minutes," said he was shown copies of the documents by CBS anchor Dan Rather and producer Mary Mapes on Sept. 5, three days before the broadcast. He said at least one of the documents bore the faxed header "Kinko's Abilene."

There is only one Kinko's in Abilene, and it is 21 miles from the Baird, Tex., home of retired Texas National Guard officer Bill Burkett, who has been named by several news outlets as a possible source for the documents.

Suspicions that Burkett could have been a source for the CBS documents first surfaced earlier this week when Newsweek magazine reported that Mapes flew to Texas to interview him over the summer. Yesterday, the New York Times reported that a CBS staff member, speaking on the condition of anonymity, confirmed that Burkett was a source for the "60 Minutes" report but "did not know the exact role he played."

Radio host Kevin McCullough discovered that Bill Burkett has a standing account at that Abilene Kinko's.

A September 12th USA Today article stated that USA Today got their copy of the documents "independently soon after the 60 Minutes segment aired Wednesday, from a person with knowledge of Texas Air National Guard operations."

Another reason to suspect Burkett, from The Kerry Spot:

Marion Carr Knox, the secretary to Col. Jerry Killian, President Bush's National Guard commander, this evening, during her interview with Dan Rather: "And there are words in there that belong in the Army, not to the Air Guard. We never used those terms."

From the Veterans for Peace web site: "Lt. Col. Bill Burkett completed 28 years of decorated service and was medically retired from the US Army National Guard in 1998."

Burkett has previously alleged that he had overheard conversations about destroying Bush's guard records, though those allegations seem largely discredited.

If Burkett is also behind these documents, he starts to look like a one-man conspiracy machine. Jane Galt:

If Burkett is involved, it begins to challenge his credibility on his earlier allegations that he had personally witnessed people "sanitising" George Bush's military record. Until now, I had regarded that story much the same way I regarded the Juanita Broderick story about Clinton raping her: certainly possible, but given that each was the sole witness of the events in question, I felt the stories were impossible to verify, and thus the respective presidents deserved the benefit of the doubt. But now, he seems more like a man obsessed . . . as if Juanita Broderick had claimed Clinton raped her, and then turned up as the main complaining witness in the Whitewater investigation.

Andy Rooney Wonders Why CBS Doesn't Admit Memos Are Fake

From The New York Daily News:

CBS curmudgeon Andy Rooney indicated yesterday he believes the controversial documents on President Bush's National Guard service are fake and said it could cost Dan Rather down the road.

"I'm surprised at their reluctance to concede they're wrong," Rooney said, referring to CBS brass.

Despite praising Rather as "a good, honest newsman," Rooney added, "I'm unsure if they're whistling in the dark instead of apologizing."

UPDATE SEPTEMBER 17: Via The Kerry Spot:

Didja ever notice that typewriters always get their keys stuck when you try to make a little 'th' when you're writing 111th? Didja ever notice that? It annoys me. You know what else annoys me? Paper clips. Why do they now have to come in all these colors? What was wrong with the regular ones?

John Ridley - NPR's "Undecided Voter"

National Review's KerrySpot looks at a NPR feature that interviews swing voters, and one swing voter in particular: John Ridley, who is also an NPR contributor.

First, isn't getting your "man on the street" from the payroll list a little on the lazy side? It's like Ted Baxter using Bernie as his "common man." And does NPR really think their staff represents a sample slice of America? Next thing you know they'll refer to Cokie Roberts as a "soccer mom" and Click and Clack as "NASCAR dads."

Anyway, Ridley doesn't seem terribly unbiased. He thinks the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth are full of it, but thinks it's too early to tell if the CBS documents are fake. Uh huh. This guy doesn't just work for NPR. He also depends on them for all of his news.

Here's the kicker from OpenSecrets.

JOHN RIDLEY LOS ANGELES, CA SELF EMPLOYED 3/23/2004
Amount donated: $500
Recipient: John Kerry

Los Angeles is a big town, and there could be more than one John Ridley. But if this is the same guy, NPR should be ashamed at trying to pass off a Kerry contributor as an undecided voter. NPR's ombudsman is apparently looking into it.

(UPDATE SEPTEMBER 29: Go here for an update. Ridley did in fact give money to the Kerry campaign, as well as $500 to Wesley Clark's campaign.)

C BS. C BS Run. Run, C BS, Run (Part 7)

Fake and inaccurate: Col. Walter Staudt has come forward. He says he never asked anyone to sugarcoat Bush's service, and didn't see anyone pulling strings to get Bush into the guard.

During his time in charge of the unit, Staudt decided whether to accept those who applied for pilot training. He recalled Bush as a standout candidate.

"He was highly qualified," he said. "He passed all the scrutiny and tests he was given."

Staudt said he never tried to influence Killian or other Guardsmen, and added that he never came under any pressure himself to accept Bush. "No one called me about taking George Bush into the Air National Guard," he said. "It was my decision. I swore him in. I never heard anything from anybody."

RatherBiased is collecting Dan Rather cartoons.

How much would an IBM Selectric Composer cost in the early 1970s? Answer: as much as a good car.

Junkyard Blog has more on document examiner James Pierce and retired guard secretary Marian Knox.

Here's a question for Knox:

Just spoke to another one of Dubya's squadron mates from the 111th. (I don't know how to do superscripts on e-mail). He passed on the Question of the Day for Mrs. Knox: You said that Mr. Bush got into the National Guard on the basis of preferential treatment "...because there were a lot of other boys in there the same way." Does that include your son, Ted, who joined the squadron in about 1972?

UPDATE A FEW HOURS LATER: Bush disputes content and authenticity of CBS memos. If anything, this is a sign that there's no doubt they're fakes, or the White House wouldn't stick its neck out. It goes along with this:

There is an adage in our business that a scoop that remains a scoop for more than 24 hours means trouble. If others don't pick up a big story, you probably got it wrong.

This is a bad scoop. Other news organizations are not picking up the story; they are picking it apart. CBS' own document analysts are all over other networks explaining how "60 Minutes II" ignored their doubts and warnings.

The LA Times Article on Buckhead

This LA Times story reports on Buckhead, the Free Republic poster who first noted problems with the CBS documents a few hours after the 60 Minutes II report aired two Wednesdays ago.

Tim Blair fisks the excessive references to Buckhead's political leanings ("Imagine; a Republican posting on a conservative website!"). Or as Patterico says, "Extra! Extra! Freeper Is Conservative! Read All About It!"

Now look at the rest of this reporting bombshell.

The memos showed Killian resisting pressure by a higher-up to "sugarcoat" Bush's performance evaluation and ordering Bush to take a physical examination so he could keep flying.

So is the LA Times saying the documents are real? That's funny. An editorial in Wednesday's LA Times said "CBS News was had. It's hard to reach any other conclusion about documents that CBS and anchor Dan Rather have defended as revealing the truth about George W. Bush's military service."

CBS has cited an expert, Bill Glennon, an information technology consultant, who said IBM electric typewriters that were in use in 1972 could provide proportional spacing and the superscript � the small "th" � evident in the disputed memos.

The network also has sought to counter the arguments by referring to a typewriting script distributor, who says the typing style in the memos has been available since 1931. Moreover, CBS points out, some of the lettering in question was evident in Bush's military records previously released by the White House.

I guess they are saying the documents are real. (BTW, RE: the superscript in the CBS docs and legitimate Bush docs, see this side-by-side comparison. They don't look remotely similar.)

Or are they really real?

Still, when Killian's former secretary came forward this week to say she did not believe the memos were authentic either, anchor Dan Rather and other network executives stopped asserting that the memos were real. They said they would "redouble" efforts to resolve unanswered questions.

The LA Times takes Knox's word that the documents are fake as gospel, because she has the two characteristics that prove trustworthiness: she's a Democrat, and she hates George Bush. So now that they have a known Democrat saying the documents are fake, they must really be fake.

Faking documents! Why, that sounds like something only an evil Republican would do:

While bloggers and some conservative activists hailed Buckhead as a hero in their longtime efforts to paint the mainstream media as politically biased, some Democrats and even some conservative bloggers have marveled at Buckhead's detailed knowledge of the memos and wondered whether that suggested a White House conspiracy.

Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe even speculated openly to reporters that the whole thing could have been orchestrated by White House political advisor Karl Rove. The Bush campaign called the allegation "nonsense."

So, to recap the story: either the phony documents are real and show that CHIMPBUSH=HITLER ONLY WORSER, or the genuine documents aren't real, in which case they're People's Exhibit A of an evil, right-wing, Republican, neo-conservative, 527, blogosphere, pajamanati conspiracy to make CBS look dumb. Either BUSH=AWOL or ROVE=MEAN. Take your pick, LA Times readers. Whatever you do, don't conclude RATHER=DUMB AND DISHONEST, even while the 60 Minutes staff is distancing itself from the 60 Minutes II staff.

C BS. C BS Run. Run, C BS, Run (Part 8)

UPDATE: The New York Times is reporting that CBS is going to back off of the documents authenticity, possibly as early as today. And as long as I'm updating, here's some X-files/Ra^thergate fanfic from Jim Treacher.

UDPATE 2: CBS has abandoned the documents and confirmed Bill Burkett as the source, saying he misled them about his source for the documents. From Dan Rather's statement:

Now, after extensive additional interviews, I no longer have the confidence in these documents that would allow us to continue vouching for them journalistically. I find we have been misled on the key question of how our source for the documents came into possession of these papers. That, combined with some of the questions that have been raised in public and in the press, leads me to a point where�if I knew then what I know now�I would not have gone ahead with the story as it was aired, and I certainly would not have used the documents in question.

Michael Dobbs has an excellent roundup in The Washington Post of the latest evidence pointing to Bill Burkett as CBS's source for the forged documents.

Newsweek reports that CBS's source received the documents anonymously in his mailbox. To recap: the documents are photocopies supposedly from a dead man's personal files, sent anonymously to a Bush-hating crank and faxed to CBS. That's a hell of a chain of custody.

Kerry's campaign may have gotten the same forged documents from Burkett.

The Daily Recycler has the video of the ABC report on CBS's own document examiners.

Radio host on CBS affiliate fired for criticizing Dan Rather. The cynic in me suspects he'll be the only person fired over Ra^thergate.

Washington Posts's side-by-side comparison of authentic documents from Lt. Col. Killian with CBS News forgeries. They don't look anything alike.

One of the CBS memos says that Colonel Staudt had put pressure on Killian to "sugercoat" Bush's record. This despite the fact that Staudt had retired the previous year.

Staudt came forward last week, denying he was under any pressure, or that he put pressure on anyone else. Now CBS has dismissed Staudt's statement. Powerline says it best:

Staudt's testimony would seem to definitively put the lie to CBS's faked memos, but that's not how CBS sees it. Yesterday CBS spokeswoman Sandy Genelius brushed off Staudt's comments:

In a debate this heated, one can hardly expect Gen. Staudt to endorse the point of view that he exerted undue influence.

So if you slander a man, as CBS did General Staudt, the fact that he has been slandered makes his response so suspect that it can safely be disregarded. And information from a person in a unique position to know the facts, like General Staudt, is immaterial; but Bill Burkett, a long-time Bush hater and Democratic activist who knows nothing about Bush's Guard service, is an "unimpeachable source," while a comment by Robert Strong to the effect that the forged documents sound like something that could have been written in the early 1970's satisfactorily confirms the documents' authenticity, even though, by his own account, Strong has never met President Bush, never spoke to Jerry Killian about President Bush, and has no idea whether the documents are forgeries or not.

At CBS News, the fact that a witness knows what he is talking about is deemed sufficient to disqualify him: an odd way to do journalism.

This LA Times piece compares the CBS News scandal to past journalistic scandals. It also has an insightful take on the documents.

The weight of expert technical opinion is that the documents are forgeries, probably the product of a contemporary word-processing program rather than the IBM Selectric typewriters in use at the time. But there is no need to descend into an arcane discussion of how many kerns can dance on the head of a microchip to sort this out. CBS has admitted that it never has possessed or seen the originals. In other words, the credibility of its report turns on photocopies provided by an anonymous source.

No reputable document examiner will authenticate anything from a photocopy � they simply are too easily manipulated. This is not complicated. Rather and Mapes, therefore, are in the position of having broadcast a report based on documents whose authenticity they cannot establish. It doesn't matter whether the contents are genuine or not, because nobody � not even "60 Minutes" � can prove it from photocopies. You do not report what you cannot prove. This, too, is not complicated.

From the doggie, Frank Abagnale, the forgery artist who was the inspiration for the movie Catch Me If You Can, told Neil Cavuto "If my forgeries looked as bad as the CBS documents, it would have been Catch Me In Two Days."

Update on NPR's "Swing Voter"

I mentioned a few weeks ago that NPR ran a week-long special interviewing swing voters, including an NRP contributor named John Ridley. People quickly searched OpenSecrets.org and discovered that arlier this year a man in Los Angeles named John Ridley had donated $500 to Kerry's campaign and $500 to Wesley Clark's campaign. You can see the info here.

NPR's ombudsman responded to complaints and confirmed that their John Ridley had donated the money, and that their interview had failed to discover that fact. Ridley claims he gave money to Republicans, but in amounts that fell under the $200 reporting threshhold. At this point, I think the burden of proof is on him to prove it. From what I can tell, and from what Bill Raftery says after reading the transcript, NPR has still not acknowledged the Clark contribution. The National Review has a response to the ombudsman.

Dan Rather Misses the Big Story

CBS runs an urban legend about the draft being re-instated based on email rumors. John Cole writes:

According to CBS, since I got an e-mail promising to dramatically increase the length and girth of my penis, "the truth of the e-mails were absolutely irrelevant," and what matters is that "it's an issue that people are talking about."

Will someone please ask Dan Rather why everyone is talking about my penis?

Fox's Carl Cameron Screws the Pooch

An apparent spoof written by Fox senior political correspondent Carl Cameron was posted to Fox's Web site. The spoof included lines like this that should never have passed the online copy editor's laugh test:

"Women should like me! I do manicures."

"Didn't my nails and cuticles look great? What a good debate!"

Blogger Joshua Micah Marshal called attention to the bogus story. Fox quickly pulled the story and issued an apology. Fox attributed the mistake to "fatigue and bad judgment, rather than malice." They've reprimanded Cameron, but the terms of the reprimand weren't disclosed.

Fox management reacted much more professionally than CBS News did after Rathergate, but the incident revealed the extent of Cameron's political biases and lack of judgement. He should be pulled off the campaign trail. At this point no one will trust his coverage.

Report from the Rathergate Commission

Mary Mapes set out to bring down George Bush and instead she's the one losing her job. In case anyone's forgotten, that's the definition of irony. The statement from CBS News chief Leslie Moonves spells out Mapes' role in all of this. Here's an excerpt:

As far as the question of reporting is concerned, the bottom line is that much of the September 8th broadcast was wrong, incomplete or unfair. The Panel found that the producer of the segment, Mary Mapes, ignored information that cast doubt on the story she had set out to report � that President Bush had received special treatment more than 30 years ago, getting into the Guard ahead of many other applicants, and had done so to avoid service in Vietnam. As the Panel found, statements made by sources were ignored, as were notes in Mapes� own files.

Most troubling, however, are the Panel�s findings regarding Mapes� ongoing contention, later proven to be false, that the documents used in the story were thoroughly authenticated and had been obtained from an �impeccable� source who had established, in retrospect, a questionable chain of custody for them. Beyond that were the evident misrepresentations of statements made to her by sources who later disavowed them. The Panel also found that Mapes presented half-truths as facts to those with whom she worked. And they trusted her, relied on her impressive reputation and proven track record, and did not hold her to the high standards of accountability that have always been the backbone of CBS News reporting.

Dan Rather got off easy, largely because he's already announced his retirement. Amazingly, Rather didn't want to apologize, and still believes in the original documents (from page 208 of the report):

The Panel asked Rather about his interview with Marcia Kramer. Rather said that he did not want to do the interview or the apology on September 20, but Heyward and Schwartz asked him to do so. Rather said that he made his case as to why an apology was not appropriate and that management did not agree with him. Rather agreed to do the apology on September 20 and the Marcia Kramer interview because he is a �team player.� Rather informed the Panel that he still believes the content of the documents is true because �the facts are right on the money,� and that no one had provided persuasive evidence that the documents were not authentic.

It is clear that Rather�s joining in the apology given his role as the correspondent on the Segment and his status as CBS News� most visible presence was critical to its acceptance. The Panel finds his comments disavowing the apology to be troubling, notwithstanding that he said he regarded himself as carrying out what CBS News felt was in its best interest on September 20.

RatherBiased has good coverage, and I guess this will just about do it for those guys. I imagine they won't mind moving on to other things.

Armstrong Williams

I'm behind the curve on the Armstrong Williams story, but it looks like a bad breach of ethics all around. In a nutshell, the White House paid the talk show host's company $240,000 for a mix of legitimate services and questionable influence.

The contract required Williams' company to produce radio and TV spots featuring one-minute "reads" by Education Secretary Rod Paige and to allow Paige and other department officials to appear as studio guests with Williams.

The commentator also was to use his influence with other black journalists to get them to discuss No Child Left Behind, a centerpiece of President Bush's domestic agenda, which aims to raise achievement among poor and minority children and penalizes many schools that don't make progress.

A government agency paying for influence on the content of the public airwaves - with no disclosure - seems wrong. If a record company paid a radio station to play its songs without disclosure that would be payola, and would be illegal. The White House and Willams both look bad here. The fact that it was taxpayer money just makes it worse.

Mary Mapes Has Learned Nothing

Mary Mapes, the CBS News producer behind the story of the fake National Guard memos, hasn't learned anything. She seems to think the conspiracy was in the debunking of the phony documents, rather than the phony documents themselves.

[Rand Simberg] ... in the case of Charles Johnson, proprieter of Little Green Footballs and web site designer, he has forgotten more about typography than Mary is ever likely to learn or (on the available evidence) be able to comprehend?

[Quoting Mapes]All these Web sites had extensive write-ups on the documents: on typeface, font style, and peripheral spacing,

[Sandberg]"Peripheral spacing"? I think that she means proportional spacing. This demonstrates again, just how little she has learned from this experience, when she doesn't even seem to possess the reasoning skills to understand the arguments against her.

Mapes is still trying to figure out time zones, too. In other words, she still hasn't digested last year's news.

Liberal blogger Kevin Drum had this to say:

I don't know what the rest of the book says, but if the first chapter of Mary Mapes's new book is any indication, she's still clinging to the notion that the infamous Killian memos that were broadcast on 60 Minutes last September are real.

[...]

This is ridiculous. Mary Mapes went to air with a story that was full of obvious holes and hadn't been checked adequately. There is tons of evidence that the memos are forged and not one single piece of evidence suggesting they're real. If Mapes is still trying to defend them, she's delusional.

And for any of the rest of you still holding out hope that just maybe the memos are real after all, let me put it this way: the evidence that they're genuine is about equivalent to the evidence that Intelligent Design is a better theory than evolution. If you're part of the reality based community, it's time to face the facts on this.

ABC vs. the Washington Post on Mary Mapes Story

It's amazing to me how differently two media outlets can report the news. Case in point: ABC's and the Washington Post's articles on disgraced producer Mary Mapes, who was responsible for the now-discredited memos supposedly proving for an absolute fact that George Bush shirked his National Guard responsibilities.

ABC's Brian Ross:

She tells Ross that she had no journalistic obligation to prove the authenticity of the documents before including them in the "60 Minutes II" report. "I don't think that's the standard," she said.

In reality, CBS showed the documents to their own document examiners before they ran the story, and their own examiners told them not to trust the documents. You'll only read about that in the WaPo, where Howard Kurtz took the trouble to research the story and interview someone other than Mary Mapes:

Linda Mason, a CBS News senior vice president, said Mapes was fired because "her basic reporting was faulty. She relied on documents that could not be authenticated -- you could never authenticate a Xeroxed copy. She led others who trusted her down the wrong road." Viacom acted because its executives were "stunned at the report" and concerned about restoring CBS News's reputation, she said.

Three of CBS's own document experts say they had warned CBS they could not authenticate the memos.

ABC:

Mapes says one of her few regrets in handling the story was her phone call to a member of Sen. John Kerry's presidential campaign staff prior to the broadcast. "I wish to God I hadn't done it, because I think it was so wildly misinterpreted." She says she made the call only as a way to gain favor with the source who provided her with the documents.

Mapes says she is continuing to investigate the source of the controversial documents whose authenticity was seriously questioned by the CBS panel.

But that source was an unassailable font of unbiased truth and non-craziness, right? WaPo:

Mapes's source for the documents, former National Guardsman Bill Burkett, later admitted lying about who had given him the memos said to have been written by Bush's long-dead Guard commander.

Aw, poor Mary Mapes. Her naive trust of the aged, along with her patriotic sympathy to the military, probably caused her to automaticlally trust an elderly person attached to a guard unit, right? Wrong! From the WaPo:

Mapes is dismissive of Marian Carr Knox, the 86-year-old former secretary to Bush's late squadron commander, who told Rather she believed the memos were fake but the substance of the documents was true. Mapes called her "maddening" and "a quite self-righteous typist."

Finally, here's Mary in her own words from her new book:

On Web sites such as Powerline, INDC Journal, Allahpundit, and Spacetownusa, the bravehearts of the blogging world worked anonymously in what appeared to be huge numbers, in unison, to destroy the Bush-Guard story, to uphold one another's wild and hateful claims, to outshout, outargue, and outblog anyone who dared to disagree.

All those bloggers were anonymous? Only if you believe Mapes. The WaPo's Kurtz tells the whole story:

"I was attacked, Dan was attacked, CBS was attacked 24 hours a day by people who hid behind screen names," Mapes said. "I may be a flawed journalist, but I put my name on things." Some of the key bloggers, however, posted criticism under their own names.

To which Bill at INDC Journal adds:

Even in forced retirement, Mapes continues her legacy of accuracy, as neither Powerline, nor Spacetown, nor INDC Journal worked anonymously during the scandal. I invite everyone to revisit my September archives and peruse the "wild and hateful claims" made by INDC. Good times.

And though I was a minor player, I also was not anonymous in my criticism of the CBS documents.

Yours truly,
Les "that's my real name, don't wear it out" Jones
Self-righteous Typist

Patterico Outs Michael Hiltzik's Sock Puppets

Patterico makes a slam dunk case against LA Times columnist/blogger Michael Hiltzik for using sock puppets to cheerlead his opinions and bash his critics. Here's a definition of sock puppets from Wikipedia:

An Internet sock puppet (sometimes known also as a mule) is an additional account created by an existing member of an Internet community. This account allows them to pose as a completely different user, sometimes to manufacture the illusion of support in a vote or argument. Other reasons include a desire to support or vote on an issue coupled with a desire to have one's "main" account stay away from the issue. This behaviour is sometimes seen as being dishonest by online communities and as a result these individuals are often labeled as trolls. This is often done on sites like eBay in order to bid on one's own auctions, although eBay forbids the practice.

Using sockpuppets is juevenile and dishonest. One reason I don't cite gun rights advocate John Lott's research is that he used a sock puppet named Mary Mosh to defend himself on Usenet.

Hiltizk responded on the LA Times blog Golden State. He desperately tries to obfuscate the difference between pseudonyms and sock puppets, but the commentors aren't having it. If Hiltzik, a Pulitzer Prize winner, honestly can't see the difference and can't understand why what he did was wrong then he needs a reprimand to get the point across.

Like one of the commentors says, "On the internet no one may know you are a dog but they can tell if you are a dog pretending to be a cat as well as a dog - if you see what I mean."

UPDATE: The LA Times suspends Hiltzik's blog.

UPDATE2: This wasn't Hiltzik's first ethical lapse:

In a stunning example of growing concern over technology and privacy in the workplace, The Los Angeles Times has recalled a foreign correspondent from its Moscow bureau for snooping into the electronic mail of his colleagues. The correspondent, Michael Hiltzik, a well-regarded journalist who joined The Times's Moscow bureau....

Yuck.

UPDATE3, days later: The NY Times story paints the issue as being about pseudonyms, rather than sock puppets. The NYT fails to use the term, and also fails to note that Hiltizk's multiple sock puppets referred to each other and to Hiltzik in the third person.

LA Times Drops Hiltzik's Column due to Sockpuppetry

The LA Times dismisses Hiltzik as a columnist. They reviewed his columns and found no problem with them. The dismissal was entirely due to his online sockpuppets.

See also:
- Patterico Outs Hiltzik's Sock Puppets

Truthout Sticks to its Crazy Guns

Last month Truthout.org (motto: "Out, out, damned truth!") published a story by Jason Leopold claiming that special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgeralnd had indicted Karl Rove and would charge him within 24 hours. The "scoop" included the docket number of the sealed indictment.

When the 24 hour deadline passed without an arrest, Truthout revised their claim to 24 "business hours," whatever that is. Days went by, and Truthout apologized for the story. Then last week (a month after the apology) Karl Rove's attorney told reporters that Fitzgerald had given him a letter saying no charges would be brought against his client, making the demolition of Leopold's fantasy complete. It appeared to be over once fat's lawyer sang, but now Truthout is claiming the story is still alive.

What appears to have happened is that - and this is where Truthout blundered - in our haste to report the indictment we never considered the possibility that Patrick Fitzgerald would not make an announcement. We simply assumed - and we should not have done so - that he would tell the press. He did not. Fitzgerald appears to have used the indictment, and more importantly, the fear that it would go public, to extract information about the Plame outing case from Rove.

Yes, it does appear that Truthout was used, but not lied to or misled. The facts appear to have been accurate. We reported them, and in so doing, apparently became an instrument. From all indications, our reports, first on May 13 that Rove had been indicted, and then on June 12 when we published case number "06 cr 128," forced Rove and Luskin back to the table with Fitzgerald, not once but twice. They apparently sought to avoid public disclosure and were prepared to do what they had to do to avoid it.

So now Truthout is claiming that Rove was, in fact, indicted, but that he was forced back to the bargaining table by their revelation of the indictment. The Truthout guys are insane. The Valerie Plame story has been playing out for years. It's been in all the papers, and was an obsession among left-wing political buffs.

Yet according to Truthout, you should ignore all of the mistaken predictions they made (Rove would be indicted in 24 hours!) and believe that their little-known Web site forced Karl Rove - the GOP Dark Master of the lefty universe - to the bargaining table pleading on his knees for mercy offering to rat out Dick Cheney. How fevered would a person need to be to believe this stuff? And how stupid do Truthout's editors have to be to continue to take the word of a disgraced, drug-addicted, three-time loser like Jason Leopold? A man who wrote in his own memoir, "A scoop is a scoop. Other journalists all whine about ethics, but that's a load of crap." Truthout has already become a punchline for B.S. ("too far out in front of the news-cycle"). Now they're following Dan Rather's career trajectory by trying to save face on a bogus story.

Greg Mitchell's Truth Problem

This is turning into a record bad month for media. The big news has been the stream of newswire photos coming out of the Israel-Hezbollah war that were either Photoshopped, obviously staged, falsely captioned, or recycled from events months earlier. You can see an impressive roundup of the fakery at Zombietime.

Writing in Editor and Publisher, Greg Mitchell wrote a two part defense of photojournalism against blogger criticism of those questionable photos. (I'm linking to Mitchell's criticisms, a courtesy he didn't extend to the bloggers he rebutts.) Confederate Yankee posted a response to Mitchell's rebuttal, but Zombietime's annotated photos are really a more compelling response. Comparing those photos to Mitchell's account, it's easy to see how badly he's mis-stating the situation.

At that point it was just a matter of differing opinions. Then Confederate Yankee discovered that Mitchell had written a 2003 article admitting to faking some quotes for a news story.

After Confederate Yankee drew attention to the article last week someone at Mediainfo edited Mitchell's 2003 article to make it less damaging. Here's the first paragraph, with the changes in bold.

Since the press seems to be in full-disclosure mode these days, I want to finally come clean. Back in 1967, when I was 19 and worked for the Niagara Falls (N.Y.) Gazette (now the Niagara Gazette) as a summer intern, our city editor asked me to find out what tourists thought about an amazing local event: Engineers had literally "turned off" the famous cataracts, diverting water so they could shore up the crumbling rock face. Were visitors disappointed to find a trickle rather than a roar? Or thrilled about witnessing this once-in-a-lifetime stunt?

You can see the orginal article at Archive.org. Someone at Mediainfo changed the article by moving Mitchell's age and the fact that he was an intern to the first paragraph (those facts were stated in later paragraphs in the original) and added the fact that this happened in 1967. It isn't clear who made those changes.

There's still more

This past weekend Dan Riehl blogged about the discovery that Mitchell had mis-stated facts in his original 2003 piece. The story in which he falfsified quotes was published not in 1967, but in 1969, the year the water was diverted from Niagara Falls. Mitchell was 21, not 19. What's more, he wasn't an intern. He was a paid professional newspaperman.

"You never forget your first newspaper job -- especially when it's the only one you've ever had -- and in my case that's the Niagara Falls (N.Y.) Gazette, at the tail end of the 1960s when it was still owned by Gannett," he wrote.

And there are indications more of Mitchell's stories were changed this past week. Again, it isn't known who made the changes, but Mediainfo.com owes it to their readers to investigate.

To recap: Bloggers catch some photojournalists faking and staging war photos. Greg Mitchell rushes to their defense. Bloggers uncover Greg Mitchell's own dirty laundry. Someone at Mediainfo alters records to soften the blow. Bloggers discover the change, and uncover misstatements in the original confession. Bloggers win, game, set, match.

Stuart Taylor on the NY Times Duke Rape Coverage

Stuart Taylor recounts the NY Times misleading coverage in the Duke lacrosse rape case.

With all or almost all of the key prosecution evidence now public, the answer to that latter question is no. What we have here is an alleged 30-minute gang rape, plus brutal beating, taking place in a small bathroom by three men without condoms, at least two of whom supposedly ejaculated; a rape in which police found none of the defendants' DNA on the supposed victim and none of hers in the bathroom. While the Times asserts that "experts say it is possible for a rapist to leave no DNA evidence," it's hard to imagine the crime alleged to have happened here leaving none.

I'm inclined to agree, since I said the same thing in May. One item from the August 25 NY Times piece drew my attention:

One suspect, Reade Seligmann, has what appears to be a powerful alibi, based on a cellphone log and other records that show he left the party early.

That's quite the understatement. Besides the cellphone company's logs of his calls, we have his friend's statements, the statements of the cab driver who picked them up, the logs of the cab company that was called, and the time-stamped videotape of the ATM where they withdrew money showing Seligman's face proves beyond any doubt he wasn't at the party when the accuser alleged he was. "Powerful alibi" doesn't begin to cover it.

Bonus! Taylor points to Durham in Wonderland, which describes itself as "Comments and Analysis about the Duke/Nifong Case."

New York Timesing the New York Times

What happens when you apply the standards of a NY Times piece criticizing the rest of corporate America to the NY Times own corporate numbers?

The chart above does to the New York Times Company what it did to all the other companies. It displays the data that show whether wages and benefits are growing or flat. It reveals whether worker's compensation is keeping pace with growth in output, or even (for that matter) with inflation. Since employees of the company are roughly five times more unionized than employees of other American companies, it also sheds light on whether trade unions are the answer to lagging earnings. Is it fair to judge this particular company for the fact that its workers only receive a little more than one-third of the total output of the company? It is -- when they condemn the rest of them for paying out only about half.

The New Republic Fires Lee Siegel

From Lean Left:

So TNR has fired Lee Siegel. Siegel, the man who coined the term “blogofacism”, obsessed over baseball hats, and accused a Slate writer of being a pedophile got caught using a sock puppet to support himself in the comments of his TNR blog.

False History in "Path to 9/11"

There's controversy over ABC's miniseries, "The Path to 9/11," which starts tonight. Bill Clinton and his former staff members in particular are angry about some of the scenes. From the best accounts, they should be.

Other than the terrorists behind the attack, no American president is to blame for 9/11. One can fairly criticize Clinton in general for not taking fundamentalist Islamic terrorism seriously. That same general level of blame can also be directed at Carter, Reagan, and Bush, Sr. All of them glossed over terrorist problems, failed to take reprisals, and cut and ran following attacks. The sum effect of all of those decisions of all of those presidents led the 9/11 terrorists to believe that a massive attack on American soil would lead to a massive withdrawl of American influence around the globe.

The real issue in "Path to 9/11" is that based on accounts of people who have seen the movie, ABC has created fictional events using historical characters. I understand that dialog has to be re-created for historical dramas. I can even understand creating composite characters to make the story simpler to tell (while cringing at the potential for abuse). What ABC has apparently done is to have specific historical characters taking specific actions and making specific decisions that aren't true to history. That's unfair to those individuals and to anyone trying to understand 9/11.

One of the people whose opinion I'm relying on is John Podhoretz, a conservative columnist for the NY Post and National Review. He's seen the original, unedited movie and while he has no love lost for the Clintons and their staff, he found parts of the movie blatantly inaccurate.

Ex-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's anger is unquestionably justified. The version that I saw has her self-righteously owning up to actions that effectively tipped off Osama bin Laden to a strike against his Afghan training camp. "We had to inform the Pakistanis," the movie's Albright insists.

The real Albright says she neither did nor said such a thing and that the meeting we see in the movie never took place. The 9/11 Commission report, on which the film is partly based, says it was a senior military official who told the Pakistanis.

The portrait of Albright is an unacceptable revision of recent history and an unfair mark on a public servant who, no matter her shortcomings, doesn't deserve to be remembered by millions of Americans as the inadvertent (and truculent) savior of Osama bin Laden.

Samuel Berger, Clinton's national security adviser, also seems to have just cause for complaint. The version of the film I saw portrays him as having ruined the CIA's one clear shot at bin Laden himself. "Do we have clearance" to shoot, the CIA asks Berger, with Osama in their sights, and Berger responds, "I don't have that authority." That scene never took place in real life. The imputation that an actual living person named Sandy Berger refused to give a specific OK to an operation that would have put an end to Osama bin Laden three years before 9/11 is a libel.

If, as reported, ABC has revised that scene to conform more closely to reality, the network has done the right thing.

ABC isn't the first to do this sort of thing. Oliver Stone famously altered history and repeated long-discredited theories in JFK and received eight Oscar nominations for his efforts. See One Hundred Errors of Fact and Judgment in Oliver Stone's JFK. Michael Moore has a reputation for unfair editing and outright fabrications. See Fifty-nine Deceits in Fahrenheit 9/11 and Bowling for Columbine: Documentary or Fiction?.

All authors are tempted to bias and unfairness. Film is a medium that is especially tempting. The author (typically in the form of the producer or director) controls the camera and the microphone, and when big budgets and big audiences are involved critics often don't have the resources or attention at their disposal to fully rebut the original film.

Lower Wal-Mart Rx Prices: Threat or Menace?

Alex Tabarrok asks Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?

Kathleen Day's article in the Washington Post on Wal-Mart's plan to offer a $4 price for many generic pharmaceuticals is a classic example, practically a caricature, of anti-market, anti-big-business bias. Here with emphases added are some choice quotes from the front page article:

Retailing giant Wal-Mart Stores Inc., known for forcing prices down to dominate nearly every market it enters, said yesterday that it would sell nearly 300 generic drugs for $4 per prescription...

Using its might as the nation's largest retailer and its legendary ability to force suppliers to cut prices to the bone, the company will begin the $4 price program in its 65 stores in the Tampa area today...

...the program has the potential to transform the $230 billion prescription-drug business the way Wal-Mart has transformed other industries, including groceries and toys, where its aggressive pricing has forced some competitors out of business and allowed it to dominate entire categories of merchandise.

In the entire article there is not a single positive mention from the reporter of consumer benefits or Wal-Mart productivity. It's not until inside the fold that you even get a hint of consumer benefits and then it's in the context of an absurdly biased attack on Wal-Mart.

Imagine how the reporter would have written the story if the price reductions were because of a government entitlement program, or an endowment by a billionaire. The coverage would be entirely positive. Yet if capitalism and efficiency create surplus value for consumers, it's apparently nothing to be happy about.

NY Times Ombudsman Regrets Swift Banking Story

The NY Times ombudsman has retracted his earlier defense of the paper's revelation of U.S. monitoring of international Swift banking transactions. The original NYT piece acknowledged that the program had successfully intercepted terrorist activities, but "raised questions" about the program's legality. In his retraction, the ombudsman acknowledged that the program does appear to be legal.

This is the right call. The original defense was always weak. If the standard for revealing classified intelligence programs was to merely question their credibility, then there was no standard - by that logic, any program could be exposed by unelected reporters and editors, at any cost to national security.

Patterico, who had excellent Swift coverage at the time, has more.

Media Behaving Badly bonus! - The BBC admits its liberal bias.

AP Used Bogus Source for Iraq Stories

U.S. Centcom has confirmed that a man whom the Associated Press frequently quoted was not a member of the Iraq security service, as he had represented himself to the AP. Gateway Pundit has a roundup. The man, who went by the name Capt. Jamil Hussein, had been the AP's source for numerous stories about civilian deaths and atrocities supposedly commited by militias since earlier this year.

The AP and Jamil Hussein

I haven't been covering the controversy over the AP's alleged source Jamil Hussein, but Patterico has.

While I want to know more about Jam(a)il Hussein, I continue to believe that it is a mistake to focus on his “existence” to the exclusion of focusing on the other problems with the AP story. I am primarily concerned with the fact that the initial AP story on the “burning six” reported that four mosques were burned. The AP later dialed that back to one mosque, but never admitted error. I’d like to see pictures of those mosques — a possibility that Armed Liberal has dangled in front of us for days. Pictures like that would be a hard fact that we could compare to Jam(a)il Hussein’s story — and if they contradict him, then Owens’s lack of corroboration for 40 other stories takes on new significance.

And now former CNN head honcho Eason Jordan even says the AP has trouble on its hands.

On an unrelated matter, Patterico has a roundup of the LA Times misdeeds in 2006. It's a big list.

Park Service Wasn't Censored by Bush Administration

Taking the word of a press release, some reporters are reporting that park rangers in Grand Canyon aren't allowed to discuss the age of the canyon, under orders from the fundamentalist-pandering Bush administration. Garry Trudeau picked up the idea for the Doonesbury comic above.

As Tim Blair demonstrates, the story ain't true. It was also debunked by commentors at at SayUncle's, who found statements on the NPS's Web site that show the park service frankly discusses geological timescales.

The Grand Canyon is considered one of the natural wonders of the world largely because of its natural features. The exposed geologic strata - layer upon layer from the baseme