Friday, September 21, 2007

Rather interesting

Saying nice things about Dan Rather does not come easily to me. Old JFK assassination buffs tend to despise him.

But I am intrigued by recent reports that new evidence will vindicate his segment on the Texas Air National Guard controversy. I wrote at some length about those documents (back in the days when no-one read this blog) and came to the conclusion that those pages were not created with Microsoft Word, as the right-wingers alleged.

(Word places superscripted numerals in a different position. I experimented with many fonts; none was a close match.)

Perhaps the best thing Dan rather ever did for this country was to bring suit against CBS News. In his complaint, he reveals the heavy-handed ways in which the government has interfered with journalism. Marcy Wheeler's writings on this matter are the best you'll find in all of blog-land. You'll also want to read what Greg Palast and Brian Lambert have to say.

CBS, it seems, had the Abu Ghraib story early on, but refused to run it:
Despite the story's importance, and because of the obvious negative impact the story would have on the Bush administration with which Viacom and CBS wished to curry favor, CBS management attempted to bury it. As a general rule, senior executives of CBS News do not take a hands-on role in the editing and vetting of a story. However, CBS News President Andrew Heyward and Senior Vice President Betsy West were involved intimately in the editing and vetting process of the Abu Ghraib story. However, for weeks, they refused to grant permission to air the story, continuously insisting that it lacked sufficient substantiation. As Mr. Rather and Ms. Mapes provided each requested verification, Mr. Heyward and Ms. West continued to "raise the goalposts," insisting on additional substantiation.

Even after obtaining nearly a dozen, now notorious, photographs, which made it impossible to deny the accuracy of the story, Mr. Heyward and Ms. West continued to delay the story for an additional three weeks. This delay was, in part, occasioned by acceding to pressures brought to bear by government officials urging CBS to drop the story or at least delay it. As a part of that pressure, Mr. Rather received a personal telephone call from General Richard B. Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, urging him to delay the story.
The complaint is here. In it, you will find the most complete account yet of the Texas Air National Guard story.

Rather claims that he was instructed to offer an on-air apology for his TANG reporting, even though he felt that none was warranted. He also acquiesced to orders from above not to defend the story in public.
Following the appointment of the panel, Mr. Redstone told Time Magazine that Viacom and CBS would "Wait for the report to try to determine whether there would be any consequences to anybody at CBS News." In that same interview, Mr. Redstone reiterated his view that he supported a Bush victory in the upcoming presidential election, which would be beneficial to Viacom.

As Mr. Redstone had made clear, it was important to Viacom to have good relations with the Oval Office. The appointment of a man with Mr. Thornburgh's background reflected CBS's desire to appoint a panel that would placate the Bush administration, while neatly laying the "blame" for the story on certain employees.
Although CBS shut down all in-house investigations of the National Guard story, the company hired a private investigator named Erik Rigler, a former FBI man. Rigler looked into the TANG controversy, and he wrote a report. Alas, the panel sitting in judgment on Rather did not get a chance to read that report. To this day, Erik Rigler has not been allowed to communicate his findings to Dan rather -- or to anyone else.

Very telling. Seems to me that if Rigler's investigation had come up goose eggs, no veil of secrecy would surround his work. Marcy Wheeler's follow-up piece indicates that Rigler found evidence authenticating the documents -- and that he also investigated Rather himself.

The panel, incidentally, did not proclaim the documents to be forgeries, and did not find that Dan Rather had committed any wrongdoing in connection with the broadcast.

Worth noting: Nobody has ever claimed Gary Trudeau's offer of ten thousand dollars to any witness who would testify that Bush did his service.

Also worth noting: When Rather was removed from his radio spot, he was specifically told that his removal was due to pressure from "the right wing." No one would dare make such an admission nowadays. These events took place just a few years ago -- yet they feel like tales from a bygone century, don't they?

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Quite right about the documents. I spent an inordinate amount of time back then staring at images of the letters and then hauling old fanzines up from my basement to find comparative samples of typing done on a proportional-space IBM Executive.

Not only were some of the fanzine fonts a pretty close match to the TANG letters, but there were irregularities in the characters that were typical of typing but would be almost impossible to reproduce on a computer. The characters were not all on the same baseline. Successive occurrences of the same character might be subtly different. And the headings on several of the letters were both at a slant to the body of the letter and slightly off-center -- suggesting that, as was common back in the 70's, someone had xeroxed multiple copies of a page that was blank except for a heading for use as letterhead stationery.

If this Rather suit does nothing else, I'd like to see it dispel the widespread myth that the letters are confirmed forgeries, rather than copies of dubious provenance.

Joseph Cannon said...

I agree, starroute. That uneven baseline thing rankled me.

Right wing proponents of the "computerized fraud" theory have argued that the up-n-down characters could have been created in a word processor -- or, more easily, in Photoshop -- in order to mimic a typewritten document.

But that argument makes no sense. Any forger careful enough to create an uneven baseline would surely have used a monospace font. He would not "accidentally" use a proportional font.

More to the point, any forger would have done what I would have done -- scour the thrift stores for an old typewriter. I saw one the other day for twenty bucks that would have done the job nicely.

I am not convinced that those documents are authentic. But I do not think they were forged in the way we were told.

Anonymous said...

I seem to recall that the documents contained kerned text, which means that they were likely produced on a computer, since kerning is essentially impossible on a typewriter (although I have no idea whether they were produced with Word or whatever).

Joseph Cannon said...

I think you are confusing the term "kerning" with "proportional font."

Kerning refers to the reduction in space between letters in a proportional font. This is usually done in (for example) the larger text -- the headline type -- in an advertisement, for aesthetic reasons.

For example, if you are putting together an ad for Ford cars, you might (depending on the type face you have chosen) want the space between the F and the lower-case o to be less than the space separating the other letters.

But you would go to that trouble only when putting together the headline text. Kerning rarely occurs in body text. It just isn't needed.

No one would ever kern a document like the TANG documents. Doesn't matter if those pages are new or old, forged or genuine. Kerning would be ridiculous.

Those texts did use proportional spacing, and that is where the controversy lies. Although many people think that all typewriters produce monospace text, there were a few expensive typewriters which produced proportional spacing. As Starroute pointed out, some fanzines back in the 1970s used that kind of typewriter.

Boy, THAT takes me back...!

Between (roughly) 1963-1979, proportional typewriter faces were also used on occasion to produce self-published books. (Proper typesetting was expensive.) Do some rooting and snorting through any large university library and you may discover the kind of book I'm talking about.

Anonymous said...

Back in the early 70's I was a secretary at a state university and did my typing on a typewriter that used proportional spacing. It was an IBM executive. If state universities had them I believe that the military also had them. They were a nightmare to use and to make corrections on. I can't believe that the misinformation out there is flying so well even when faced with the truth.