Ramblings' Journal

CBS News lied and forged their on-air documents

Memos shown on CBS' 60 Minutes last night were forged. Why? We all know why -- to smear the President and his campaign.

How do we know? Take a look here and consider this.

every single one of these memos to file is in a proportionally spaced font, probably Palatino or Times New Roman.

In 1972 people used typewriters for this sort of thing, and typewriters used monospaced fonts.

The use of proportionally spaced fonts did not come into common use for office memos until the introduction of laser printers, word processing software, and personal computers. They were not widespread until the mid to late 90's. Before then, you needed typesetting equipment, and that wasn't used for personal memos to file. Even the Wang systems that were dominant in the mid 80's used monospaced fonts.

I am saying these documents are forgeries, run through a copier for 15 generations to make them look old.

One other point that is being made is the fact that the CBS documents include the superscripted "th" behind the date.

Superscripted ordinals weren't norm until personal computers and programs like Word became commonplace -- certainly not the case during the Vietnam years, when this supposed to have occured.

The documents are purported to show that President Bush lied about his National Guard service. But with this evidence, the larger question is who, inside of CBS, is responsible for this? No one has owned up, but as the deck chairs are being rearranged, there are indications that Dan Rather himself is at the center of this mess.

Just damn.

Posted by mhking at September 9, 2004 07:42 PM