Rathergate, CBS

[cema]

For those who follow this rather silly story: Ra^thergate.com

Update, of sorts. I do not really care if this story is better for the Right wing or Left wing or whatever. These are just documents, anyone can look at them and get an opinion. Can also read what other people have to say and decide what sounds reasonable and what does not.

This, I think, is not so much a political issue (not for me, anyway) as it is a matter of journalistic integrity and ethic. My opinion about the latter (JI&E, that is) has been steadily going down for more than a decade now. I wish the trend had gone the other way. Fortunately, with the Internet, there are alternative sources of information, but the conventional media are still much more dominant, especially in certain areas such as local news. I hope things will improve in the near future, though.

Update. For those of you who, like some in the threads below, would rather take the whole thing seriously, here is an entry from the always useful, if not always unbiased, wikipedia.

Update. The Paper Trail: A Comparison of Documents from the Washington Post print edition. Did they go right wing too?

Comments

[arbat.livejournal.com]

Well, you may yawn as much as you want to - your guy Dan Rather fucked up big time. You see - however often you repeat "ritgh-wing", it would not make forgery any more genuine. The sooner you decide it is time to cut your loses and admit the obvious - the less stupid you will feel.

By the way - here is an opinion of an expert: JOSEPH M. NEWCOMER, PH.D., and I mean - expert. Not some guiy, who used to repair typewriters.

[cema.livejournal.com]

Come on, email_animal is also a Ph.D, you won't scare him with suffixes! :-)

[arbat.livejournal.com]

well, I just copy-and-pasted the title from his resume.
anyways, I would presume that this guy is a better expert, then Dan Rather's second expert, whose qualification is "used to repair typewriters".

[email-animal.livejournal.com]

I resent the "your guy" comment.

Thanks for the link. Interesting read. In my personal opinion showing that the document looks like one created in MS Word is not sufficient. One also has to show that there was no other way to create it. That part of the Joseph M. Newcomer's, Ph.D. discussion was more important.

[arbat.livejournal.com]

As I said - it depends on how high you think is the probability that two different systems - one mechanical, another - computer-based, made in different times, at very different stages of the evolution of fonts in particular nad typesetting in general - can produce exactly matching results.

[email-animal.livejournal.com]

I always, perhaps somewhat naively, thought that the whole point of having a font was to ensure that documents written in it would look the same regardless of how they were created.

[arbat.livejournal.com]

Well, fonts evolve. Unless they are standardized.
In any case - we have yet to hear about some typewriter that was equipped with a font that exactly matched today's Times Roman.

[cema.livejournal.com]

This is incorrect. A font name actually describes a whole family of fonts, and there are many parameters that are used by typographers to make a text look better. Kerning and pseudo-kerning... I will not even start about that. :-) But adjustments such as the line height, character spacing, justification and general placement of text portions are obvious and easily understood. Easily modified with computer, too; not so with a typewriter.

There is a relevant wikipedia entry now, I will list it in the main posting.