These days, CBS News anchor Dan Rather and his colleagues at the network's magazine program "60 Minutes II" are enduring an unusual wave of second-guessing by some of the public and fellow journalists.
For that, they can thank "Buckhead."
[Buckhead is the Freeper whose "hints" about what was wrong with the "60 Minutes" memos put web detectives on the road to discovery.--Jen]
It was a late-night blog posting by this mystery Netizen that first questioned the validity of documents Rather cited Wednesday as proof that George W. Bush did not fulfill his National Guard duty more than 30 years ago.
Buckhead refuses to further identify himself, other than dropping hints that he is a male who lives on the East Coast preferring to proclaim that the scramble to verify the contentions in his posting marks an extraordinary achievement for a medium that has operated more as an underground world of ideological venting than a source of legitimate news.
[This is neither a fair nor an accurate description of the blogosphere; not only are there Liberal and Conservative blogs, but given the proclivity of the MSM to only report "news" that is favorable to their (Leftist) ideological agenda, it is often left to bloggers and Conservative talk radio to get out the "real news" to the American public!
The Media situation has deteriorated so much in the past 4 years, I'd say that it's the MSM that does the "ideological venting" rather than being the source of legit news and the whole Dan Rather scandal proves it!--J.T.]
But Buckhead is vehement about one thing: He acted alone when he posted, to the conservative website FreeRepublic.com, what was widely believed to be the first allegation that the CBS report relied on documents that could have been forged.
"Absolutely, positively, on my own, sitting at my computer in my bedroom just before midnight but not in my pajamas," he wrote in an e-mail exchange with The Times. "But once I posted the comment to Free Republic I was no longer working alone, and that is the real point of the story about the story about the story."
That story began Wednesday, 19 minutes after the "60 Minutes II" broadcast began, when another FreeRepublic poster, TankerKC, noted that the documents were "not in the style that we used when I came into the USAF
. Can we get a copy of those memos?"
Less than four hours later, Buckhead pointed to "proportionally spaced fonts" in the memos, which CBS said had been written in the early 1970s by Bush's commanding officer, Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, who died in 1984. Buckhead concluded that the documents had been drafted on a modern-day word processor rather than a typewriter.
"I am saying these documents are forgeries, run through a copier for 15 generations to make them look old," Buckhead wrote. "This should be pursued aggressively."
And it was with startling speed.
[This is the beauty of the blogosphere: there are literally thousands of patriotic Americans out there who can and will "fact check the a$$es" of the MSM and do it in real time. We've been doing it for years now!
And there's a certain synergy you get in the blogosphere that is found nowhere else, due to links and connectivity--we all "feed" off each other's ideas, if you will, and at lightning speed.
As the authors of the Clue Train Manifesto put it, "Hyperlinks subvert hierarchies."
That would mean hierachies like that of CBS News and the L.A. Times editorial staff.
Further, Clue Train authors have this to say about today's Internet, which would definitely apply to the blogosphere and the outing of these forgeries in particular:
"We are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. We are human beings--and our reach exceeds your grasp. Deal with it."]
Early Thursday morning, Minneapolis lawyer Scott Johnson was in his basement home office, preparing to link some morning news reports to the site he co-authors, when a reader sent an e-mail about Buckhead.
Intrigued, Johnson, whose online ID is "The Big Trunk," put a link on his site, PowerLine Blog.com, to Buckhead's post.
Then the floodgates opened.
"Thanks to all the readers who have written regarding this post," Johnson wrote in an early update. "Several have pointed out that the Executive line of IBM typewriters did have proportionally spaced fonts, although no reader has found the font used in the memos to be a familiar one or thought that the IBM Executive was likely to have been used by the National Guard in the early 1970s.
Reader Monty Walls has also cited the IBM Selectric Composer," he continued. "However, reader Eric Courtney adds this wrinkle: The 'Memo To File' of August 18, 1973, also used specialized typesetting characters not used on typewriters. These include the superscript 'th' in 187th, and consistent ' (right single quote) all parentheses in original used instead of a typewriter's generic {minute} (apostrophe). These are the sorts of things that typesetters did manually until the advent of smart correction in things like Microsoft Word."
Soon Charles Johnson, a Los Angeles musician-turned-conservative-blogger who hosts the site LittleGreenFootballs.com, posted the results of his own investigation. He wrote that he had opened Microsoft Word, set the font to Times New Roman and used the program's default settings to retype a purported Killian memo from August 1973.
"My Microsoft Word version, typed in 2004, is an exact match for the documents trumpeted by CBS News as 'authentic,' " Johnson wrote, posting images of his creation and the CBS document. (The Times New Roman font itself predates computers; it was designed in 1932.)
Within 90 minutes of that post, the Power Line site was linked to perhaps the best-known conservative site of all the Drudge Report, made famous when Matt Drudge took a lead role in the first reports on the relationship between then-President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky.
[I think it's a little generous to call Drudge "Conservative," but it does turn out the way usually, in the end. Matt does tend to pursue the most outrageous and scandalous stories, no matter whom they hurt or help.
Often, this doesn't work to Conservatives' favor--like pushing the Abu Ghraib non-story, another "60 Minutes" special, BTW.--Jen]
"That was a quantum jump in awareness," said Scott Johnson. "It was wildly circulating in the blogosphere until Drudge linked us. Then it was instantly known to a million people, and it was all of a sudden a legitimate story."
[IOW, it had "legs"--and all without the help, or in spite of, the mechanisms of Old Media.]
Suddenly, the story line shifted from the question Democrats had been trying to ask whether Bush received special treatment in the Guard to whether a network long detested by conservatives had been duped in its quest to air a report critical of the president in the midst of the reelection campaign.
Journalists at mainstream media outlets rushed to consult with experts to check the validity of the documents.
[Note the Big Story is that no-one at CBS News even bothered to do this before the story was aired on CBS, because they wanted it to be true, authenticity be damned!]
The claims of seemingly legitimate analysts posting commentary online could not be ignored.
"If the blog enthusiasts wanted to write a better scenario, they'd have a hard time coming up with one more spectacular than this one," said Jim Geraghty, host of the Kerry Spot blog published by the conservative National Review, whose e-mail queue was filled by font experts from across the nation wanting to weigh in.
Democrats point to the timeline as evidence of a right-wing conspiracy; Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe suggested to reporters Friday that White House political advisor Karl Rove might have cooked up the memos, presumably with the idea that they would be discredited. A Bush spokesman called the charge "nonsense."
[What can you say about this ludicrous assertion of McAwful's, except that the lunatics are running the Dimocrat asymlum and have been for some time...?--Jen]
"It was amazing Thursday to watch the documents story go from FreeRepublic.com, a bastion of right-wing lunacy, to Drudge to the mainstream media in less than 12 hours," said Jim Jordan, a strategist for independent Democratic groups opposed to Bush.
[How unfair to call Freepers "lunatics!"
Sure, like any political group they have their fringe who believe "tin foil hat" theories are true, but for the most part, they're a group of caring, informed Americans who love their country.
If you wanna see crazy, trip over to DemocratUnderground for a look-see!]
"That's not to say the documents didn't deserve examination. But apparently the entire thing was cooked up by a couple of amateurs on Free Republic. The speed with which it moved was breathtaking."
[Note the Dims' operative eagerness to ignore bloggers!]
By Friday, articles in The Times, the Washington Post and other news outlets were quoting some analysts raising questions about the CBS documents, and others saying it was impossible to judge the memos' authenticity without seeing the originals.
[SOP for any matter where the truth of documents is concerned, wouldn't you say?]
Rather opened his evening news broadcast Friday with a defense of his report, producing an "analyst"[Sneer quotes mine.--Jen] who vouched for the memos.
But at the same time, one man who Rather had said would corroborate CBS' report retired Maj. Gen. Bobby Hodges, Killian's direct supervisor told The Times that he did not think the memos were real.
Media experts said the role of the bloggers illustrated a significant development in the relationship between mainstream news and the still-nascent phenomenon of blogging.
[And where, pray tell, would we all be without "Media experts?"]
This was the first time, some said, that the Web logs were engaging in their own form of investigative journalism and readers, they warned, should be cautious.
[It's the first of many, I would predict, too.
No stopping us now!]
The mainstream press is having to follow them,"
[BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!]
said Jeffrey Seglin, a professor at Emerson College in Boston. "The fear I have is: How do you know who's doing the Web logs?
[How do we know who's doing the "60 Minutes" stories and putting the show together?
It's still not true!
Typical Liberal smear: Attack the messenger.
The snide remark about us doing it in our PJs was another straw man argument.
Look on the bright side: we might be naked!]
"And what happens when this stuff gets into the mainstream, and it eventually turns out that the '60 Minutes' documents were perfectly legitimate, but because there's been so much reporting about what's being reported, it has already taken on a life of its own?"
"All hail 'Buckhead,' " wrote one posting to Free Republic.
"Here, here," wrote another. "But how do we know Buckhead is really not Karl Rove
. "
Doesn't matter if it was Karl Rove, although if it were, that's interesting and funny because it means that Karl saw the potential of the blogosphere to bust the preexisting monopoly on the "news" of the MSM which is nothing but a Liberal machine spreading their "progressive" agenda and their propaganda disguised as "news."
That explosion you heard is the sound of Old Media ( Network TV and newspapers) imploding and New Media (blogs +Conservative talk radio + Fox News) gaining strength like the Incredible Hulk!
It doesn't matter "who" we are, whether we're wearing our pajamas when we post or if we're up in the middle of the night; in fact, that's the beauty of it!
Such is the state of the Internet, internet connectivity and software programming that makes desktop publishing (i.e. blogging) possible.
Into the void of "fair and balanced" news come the bloggers--the 21st Century and Information Age is well and truly born.
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