A Warning to Pajama Pundits: The Lesson of Rathergate, so far, is not that the Blogosphere beat the MSM
Rather, it is not to use shoddy forgeries. Joseph Newcomer, typesetting expert par excellence, said during his deconstruction of the pathetic fakes:
There has been a lot of activity on the Internet recently concerning the forged CBS documents. I do not even dignify this statement with the traditional weasel-word “alleged”, because it takes approximately 30 seconds for anyone who is knowledgeable in the history of electronic document production to recognize this whole collection is certainly a forgery, and approximately five minutes to prove to anyone technically competent that the documents are a forgery. I was able to replicate two of the documents within a few minutes.
Imagine if the forger were someone with half a brain instead of a twenty-two year old kid working for the Travis County Democrats, Bill Burkett, or some such. Imagine if he got a Selectric or Model C or an old Smith-Corona to type on. Imagine if he paid attention to the plentiful real Killian memos to copy their layout and style (as shown in the Washington Post).
There would have been no raised “th”, no kerning, no proportional fonts, no Times Roman, no glaring style flubs: very little would have remained to establish the documents as obvious forgeries. The wrong paper, yes, that would remain: they wouldn’t have been typed on 8×10.5 paper, and that would show up even through the copying. There would probably have been other “tells” as well.
Consider this, however: even with the overwhelming evidence that the Rathergate memos were the cheapest, gaudiest frauds, CBS acknowledges only this after a week and a half. From Andrew Heyward, President of CBS News:
Based on what we now know, CBS News cannot prove that the documents are authentic, which is the only acceptable journalistic standard to justify using them in the report.
Imagine what this “news” executive would say if the blogosphere produced evidence less compelling of the fraudulent nature of the memos. Beware, blogosphere, the enemy is now on notice, and such softballs as the Rathergate memos will be rare in the future.