Hell. YEAH! Some source screws ME like that and I’d toss him to the dogs.
Continuing our moderator’s lead, other comments that probably belong in other threads:
Mrs Killian said that the late Colonel would not have saved any memos. While that may be true for most, any memo I title CYA I plan on saving until Doomsday and I suspect Col Killian felt the same, especially when it’s about someone from as prominent a family as Lt Bush.
Without commenting on their contents, yeah, these don’t look like they were his originals. They also don’t look like they were done in Word–they look too good. There’s a flow to the characters that MS’s typefaces seem to lack. Has anybody tried using older technology–say, Wordstar and a Postscript printer–to duplicate them? While they are probably not originals they also may not have been created last week.
Ms Knox has a much better memory of the 70s than I do, if she remembers stuff like that. Of course, my lifestyle was more like Lt Bush’s than hers.
Damn, the Selectric was a great typewriter! I’m still not a good enough typist to use one. It’s like driving a Ferrari when you’re used to a Taurus.
But why? This is an honest question. I don’t understand what legitimate journalistic purpose is served by doing this. Wouldn’t that position encourage others, possibily more skilled forgers and liars when any possibility of retribution is removed? Wouldn’t that policy create even more of this type of behavior? Even more issues of credibility like this one? We’re not talking about an innocent person here. What purpose is served by protecting those who intentionally act in “bad faith” -?
I also found myself laughing out loud at the thought of Dan’s expose on himself.
“This just in, a major news anchor who participated in DNC fund raising is caught using forged documents on a hatchet piece against the incumbent Republican. Un-named sources within CBS have confirmed he ignored the advice of his own document experts”.
“A live update, due to falling ratings, the news anchor in question will be replaced by Andy Rooney. Hey wait a minute…”
Dan, you’re in free-fall and taking the local stations down with you.
CBS, you might want to tell your news commentators to stay away from political fund raisers in an attempt to look neutral during an election.
I didn’t say that there was a strong case that they are transcripts. I said that there was a good case that they are either forgeries or trancscripts; in other words, not originals. I said nothing about whether originals ever even existed. I was talking about the physical evidence. I wasn’t aware of anything Knox had said.
As far as I know, there is no evidence that the CBS documents are anything but counterfeit government documents. There’s certainly no documented support that these counterfeits are counterfeits from original government docs, or that originals even exist, or even that they came from any other documented source. I suspect they originated with some guy who had a good idea and a PC. Now that Mr. Rather seems to be “breaking the story” and questioning these documents, it’d be nice if CBS would let us in on the – ‘who done it?’ part. Will Rather “break” that story or just the obvious one?
My impression of it is that if they were done on a typewriter such as that available in the early 1970s, they would’ve had to use kerning to adjust the spaces between the letters, something which is automatically done in word processors today.
I did not. They were sent to me by somoene else on another forum, and since his posts had always been an honest effort at accuracy before, I took them at face value. I’m at work and don’t currently have much of the software I need here, so I didn’t attempt to overlay them myself to see what would happen.
If you got different results, it could be that there was more manipulation to those files than I was told.
Anyway, I think if CBS does find out that they were forged, as in multiple experts so sure they’re forged as to be able to testify to it under oath, then CBS and Dan Rather should admit that they were duped. Potentially it is a case for the authorities also, but I am not sure about the law regarding forged memos.
I should’ve checked them out better before I linked. I apologize.
Maybe the Feds’ll get on it … I can see the Justice Dept. getting right on this case, though of course tracking the people who leaked Plame’s CIA connection seem to be mysteriously undoable. :rolleyes:
Is it your wish that I should an interrogative instead of a qualifier in these instances? Would that make you any happier?
Not that I care, just curious.
I’ve duplicated the memos in Word, and achieved almost perfect results - on the order of the same results that are in that comparison that’s all over the web. However, I had to do some scaling to get it to fit. That may be because of the way I chose to do it - I opened acrobat, loaded the PDF of the documents, and set it to 100% scaling. Then I took a screen shot. Then I opened Word, typed the memo, and took a screen shot of that. One was larger than the other. So I loaded them both into layers in Photoshop, and scaled the smaller layer until it matched the other.
Note that I scaled both dimensions equally - I didn’t stretch it horizontally and vertically to make it fit - I simply scaled the layer until the lines matched in height, preserving the proportions. Once I did that, the documents matched.
Gaudere, I’m wondering if you are using a different standard for ‘match’ than I am. Of course the documents don’t match perfectly, because one was faxed and photopied repeatedly. The result of that is to add noise to each letter, which in effect makes them look thicker and bigger. So when you alternate between the two, you get slight ‘blooming’. IMO, the original document is not in good enough shape to identify the font perfectly. It is a close variant, but you can’t say with perfect accuracy that it’s Times New Roman.
However, more critically in my opinion, the character and line spacing is identical. The characters overlay each other perfectly. In my experience, different machines that both use TNR will not space out exactly. In fact, even different software programs on the same computer will not reproduce that memo exactly. It’s highly improbably that a 35 year old typewriter would produce character and line spacing identical to Word.
But we keep skirting around the facts here. We now have testimony from the secretary that she used A) An Olympia manual typewriter, and B) later, an IBM Selectric. Both of these are monospaced typewriters. Neither could make these documents. Questions about whether a Selectric Composer or an Executive could make these memos are moot, since we now know she didn’t have either of those machines. In any event, neither of those other machines could make these documents anyway. I’ve already linked to a web site where someone tried to duplicate them on a Composer and failed. The Executive had a fixed type bar and couldn’t do true superscript. Case closed.
On Fox earlier today (The Big Story), they said that it would be a crime under both Texas and Federal law. Something about misrepresentation or the like (for the signature) under Texas law, and about altering/forging/etc. military documents for the feds.
I know what kerning is, I have been in print design for 5+ years. Kern, most simply, is the space between letters, whether the font is proportional or monospace or what-have-you. If a face is proportional, you do not have to manually adjust kerning in order to have different sized “space” for each letter; that’s what makes proportional different from monospace. “Kerning”, as a change from the default spacing between letters, is not automatic in Word.
There is “kerning”, noun, the space between letters, and “kerning”, verb (gerund), adjusting the space. “Kerning”, verb, is moving letters closer together or farther apart from their default in order to achieve a desired look. Sometimes just for looks or readabilty, but most commonly–and what is generally thought of as “kerned”-- to space out more aesthetically certain letter pairs, like Yo, Wo, Ty, Ya, Tr, and so on. Word processors have a primitive control of kerning; I don’t know when or if typewriters developed it. Certainly it is theoretically possible with electric typewriters to be able to set a variety of kerns. No idea if anyone bothered.
What I was looking for was something showing a “Va” or “Wo” that are closer together in the kerned text than they would be in unkerned text. You can see here: http://www.triorb.com/stuff/w.gif that the period is nipped in in the kerned text, but the letters of “Bush” have NOT changed kern. When you “turn on kerning” in Word it only affects certain letter combos. Overall spacing between the letters is indeed considered “kern” but it just depends on the standard settings of your typewriter/word proc how much space you have between letters. If the text of the memos was overall spaced out wider or closer than the same in Word, that would most likely simply show that either someone went to the trouble of changing the native overall kern on the memos when typing them in Word, or the typewriter used had a different native kern than Word, or there has been warpage from many reproductions. It would not show that “kerning” as we typically think of it was used, to nicely space those problematic letter pairs.
Ya know, I think this has to be a lot bigger than people think. I don’t believe CBS was duped. I believe CBS (or rather those directly responsible for the story) deliberately perpetrated a hoax less than two months before the election. I think they expected that almost all of the Bush-hating media would see this and just play along (and to a disturbingly large degree some have!)
Reason I think this is not just the standard ‘liberal media’ thing, but because of everything that’s been said here, namely that these are mind-numbingly incompetent, obvious forgeries! Even if the CBS reporters behind this story are Bush-hating liberals I find it hard to believe anyone with even a remote background in journalism wouldn’t be able to recognize a modern, MS Word document.
And as far as I’m concerned, stick a fork in it, that’s what these are. In fact they are so bad, the person behind them was so lazy (or, who knows, maybe so stupid) that calling them ‘forgeries’ (and therefore their creator a ‘forger’) is giving them too much credit! I find it embarrassing to even argue the point, its so obvious.
And on a related hijack, let’s reverse it. Imagine for a minute if Fox News, big bad evil Fox News had put forth as obviously fake documents as these about John Kerry. Less than two months from the election.
We don’t know whether the CBS documents were created by the person who sent them to CBS, or whether that person simply found them somewhere, thought they looked authentic, and sent them in.
More importantly, we don’t know whether any potentially incriminating documents in the future will be authentic, or forgeries created by the source, or forgeries unwittingly passed along by the source. And if CBS has a policy of revealing the source for documents that turn out to be fake, then future sources aren’t going to pass along any documents if they’re not 100% sure where they came from.
That means documents that probably are authentic won’t come to light, simply because they might conceivably be fake, and the guy who discovers them doesn’t want to risk being trashed because of it. And that’s bad for journalism.
And, just for kicks, who are “the Bush-hating media”? I may need to call my cable operator to see if I can get those channels.
Hmm, would Fox News, a network that has a track record of political bias and is run by staunch Bush supporters at every level, be treated differently from CBS? You bet. For good reason.
And CBS giving up it’s source will not help them. It can only hurt. It will play like CBS ran away when things got sticky. It would be a PR disaster in the realm of journalism. It would hang around their necks much longer than simply getting duped would.
Because I think it sets a bad precidence. I think reporters/news agencies sources should remain confidential reguardless. My take is that CBS should just come out with a retraction of the story or acknowledge that the documents were forgeries and they were duped. Now, if some OTHER news agency wants to dig in and find and publish the sources, thats another story. But reguardless of whether CBS was lied to or not, they should protect their sources…thats just my opinion.
As opposed to the mainstream media, which is run by staunch Kerry supporters at every level? The mainstream media that was in such a rush to find dirt on Bush that it got duped into putting obvious forgeries on the air?
Kern, most simply, is the space between letters, whether the font is proportional or monospace or what-have-you. If a face is proportional, you do not have to manually adjust kerning in order to have different sized “space” for each letter; that’s what makes proportional different from monospace. “Kerning”, as a change from the default spacing between letters, is not automatic in Word.
