Who Can Really Say?

CBS News and the Pit of Despair

Preparing to write this post, I searched WCRS for "CBS" and found something like 15 or 16 entries relating to September 8, 2004's Sixty Minutes Wednesday report on the Killian National Guard documents. I was dismayed to find this post from November 23:

Still hanging in the air is the CBS internal investigation of L'Affair de Memo, a/k/a Rathergate. Considering that Rather won't actually leave the anchor desk until March and that he got a cushy landing spot at 60 Minutes, I'm guessing the results of the investigation will be more whitewash than anything else. But to be fair, I don't know why we should expect CBS to indict itself, even if that's what's called for.

Having quickly reviewed some of the key parts of the Independent Review Panel report and read a fair number of blog posts by those who have read much more than I, I think it's less whitewash than not. See how easy it is to correct yourself Dan?

Indeed, much of the report is devoted to how badly CBS handled the broadcast's aftermath. But my first interest all along has been the documents themselves, and whether simply being able to reproduce them in revealing detail on MS Word would itself prove to be the foundation of their falsity. The answer to that is found in Appendix 4. Oh -- and the answer is yes.

The Report doesn't examine the host of typographic issues presented by the documents but focuses on a handful, such as the superscript "th" and the apparent font, Times New Roman. The Report did not find that the documents were forged, but concludes that they can't be defended as authentic either (all page references to the Report are to the PDF page numbering):

The Panel has not been able to conclude with absolute certainty whether the Killian documents are authentic or forgeries. However, the Panel has identified a number of issues that raise serious questions about the authenticity of the documents and their content. With better reporting, these questions should have been raised before the September 8 Segment aired. [Report, p.4]

The key phrase here is "absolute certainty" -- it's not a journalistic standard and it isn't a legal one either. My first question is, why is it the standard applied here? It's a good question and there's no answer to be found in the report, other than -- well speculate as you will.

Yet the Report provides an overwhelmingly basis for concluding that the documents are not authentic, and in combination with the exhaustive forensic examination of CBS's reporting and later attempts to defend that reporting, it's obviously less whitewash than more. Indeed, from my brief review it appears the strongest part of the Report is its dismantling of the "fake but accurate" defense mounted by CBS in the days following the broadcast. Well, to be fair, the defense was more along the lines of "unverifiable, but accurate", although that's not much help to CBS.

But back to Appendix 4. The Appendix relates the work of Peter Tytell, a document and typographic expert retained to analyze the documents by the Independent Review Panel. The Appendix is cited 15 times in the report, mostly in reference to whether or not the superscript "th" was available on typewriters in the early 1970's -- typewriters that might have been available in the Texas Air National Guard. CBS attempted to contact Tytell the night before the broadcast and was only successful in doing so on September 9 and 10. From page 185 of the Report:

The Panel met with Tytell and found his analysis sound in terms of why he believed the documents were not authentic. A summary of that analysis is set forth in Appendix 4. The Panel reaches no conclusion as to whether Tytell was correct in all respects. The Panel observes, however, that if 60 Minutes Wednesday management had met with Tytell and heard the same information as did the Panel, it might not have continued to support so fully the authenticity of the Killian documents absent further investigation.

Appendix 4 is only 18 pages long, and Tytell's findings are summarized in only the 2^nd paragraph of the first page.

Tytell concluded, for the reasons described below, that (i) the relevant portion of the Superscript Exemplar was produced on an Olympia manual typewriter, (ii) the Killian documents were not produced on an Olympia manual typewriter, and (iii) the Killian documents were produced on a computer in Times New Roman typestyle. Tytell acknowledged that deterioration in the Killian documents from the copying and downloading process made the comparison of typestyles "to some extent a subjective call." However, he believed the differences were sufficiently significant to conclude that the Killian documents were not produced on a typewriter in the early 1970s and therefore were not authentic.

The Report did not have to find the documents to be forged to reach its conclusions. And yet, if nothing else it seems pretty clear that despite some attempts to ressurect their validity (try here for the most recent, which is in some ways a rehash of earlier efforts), there's no basis to believe that they are NOT forged. Oh -- and the spirited defense of a Commenter here in my first post on the subject is - 'er - not sustained.

Anyway, there's much more to the story -- Mary Mapes's contact with the Kerry campaign also revealed in one of the Appendices, her continued defense of the story, and Dan Rather's reluctance (but not refusal) to offer an on-air apology -- and more are all there, waiting to be picked up for light summer reading. And the ultimate question -- did the serious errors documented in the report result from bias -- is one we'll all be talking about for a while.

Was there bias? Was it "liberal" bias? Well, even if the Panel had drawn that conclusion we'd still be debating it. But I ask you this: had FoxNews -- no, not O'Reilly or Hannity et al., but the news guys, had FoxNews fallen into this pit of despair, I feel confident in offering the conjecture that we'd be having exactly the same conversation.

[Linked to the Beltway Traffic Jam.]

Posted by Peter at January 10, 2005 07:25 PM