Who Can Really Say?

To Type or To Word Process. That is the Question.

To type, or to word process? That is the question. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous superscripts, or take arms against a sea of fonts . . . .

You get the idea. Lost, at least to me this week, was the news that one David Hailey, an Associate Professor at Utah State University, had performed a "forensic study" of CBS's Bush National Guard documents and concluded that they weren't digitally produced, and that there's no reason to believe from their appearance that they are inauthentic. Daily Kos lapped it up, but Wizbang exposed multiple problems with the analysis, particularly that Hailey's own reproductions of the CBS docs were themselves created on a word processor, something that Hailey didn't originally note in his paper.

Here's a good summary of the entire affair, which is still unfolding.

The fundamental point of the document's detractors is that if you can replicate a 1970's era typewritten document with little effort on a modern word processor using fonts, line spacing, centering, and other functions not found on that aged equipment, then it's unlikely that the documents were indeed created on that equipment. The proof in their instant pudding is that one can actually do exactly that with CBS's documents.

On the other hand, the essence of what Hailey's trying to say (although not very effectively) is that there's enough evidence one can glean from the face of the documents to support the inference that they are copies of documents produced on a 1972 vintage typewriter. Aside from the fact that Killian's secretary says she used a manual Olympia typewriter which could not produce these documents, Hailey hasn't answered the challenge of the detractors -- he hasn't replicated the documents using an old typewriter.

But here's a thought -- let's flip this proof around. Everyone takes for granted that creating a document on a modern word processor that is virtually identical to an old document is proof positive that the "old" document is not old at all. Is that indeed true? Can a 1970's era document (and let's start with any old but authentic document) be easily reproduced in Word? If so, then doesn't that to some degree undercut the argument that the CBS documents are necessarily inauthentic? My guess is that it is not at all easy to do, but if you're trying to establish authenticity (or at least undercut the detractor's argument) it would be a start, and a much better one than Hailey's.

Posted by Peter at October 2, 2004 09:31 AM