Dan Blather shows up for his new job on Monday.
Posted on 9/10/2004, 1:11:00 PM by kattracks
In a stunning journalistic fiasco from which the mainstream press may never recover, a full frontal attack by two out of the three major broadcast networks on President Bush's reelection bid has collapsed amidst questions about forged documents and fraudulent testimony.CBS's Dan Rather's already shaky journalistic reputation was in tatters Friday morning, after documents unearthed during his Wednesday night "60 Minutes II" broadcast purporting to show a cover-up of Bush's National Guard record were called probable forgeries by forensic experts. Memos uncovered and touted by Rather's team appear to have been written in Microsoft Word, the experts said - a computer program that did not exist at the time Bush was in the Guard.
The same documents, purportedly authored by Bush Guard commander Jerry Killian, were challenged by Killian's widow and son, who told reporters on Thursday that the deceased National Guard commander would have never written such memos.
A second portion of Rather's "60 Minutes II" broadcast, featuring allegations against Bush from former Texas Lieutenant Gov. Ben Barnes, was also discredited, when his daughter Amy told a Texas radio station that her father was a "liar" who had changed his story to sell a book.
NBC News was also mired in a credibility crisis, as a spokeswoman for the network's "Today Show" insisted it was going forward with its planned rollout of Kitty Kelley's Bush bashing book, "The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty" - even though Kelley's key witness against Bush has recanted her account that Bush used cocaine and has accused Kelley of fabricating her interview.
"I categorically deny that I ever told Kitty Kelley that George W. Bush used cocaine at Camp David or that I ever saw him use cocaine at Camp David," ex-Bush sister-in-law Sharon Bush said in a statement issued Thursday.
Instead, the one-time Bush family insider insisted, "When Kitty Kelley raised drug use at Camp David, I responded by saying something along the lines of, 'Who would say such a thing?'"
Still, "Today Show" spokeswoman Lauren Kapps insisted that NBC producers had no plan to cancel or even scale back Kelley's three day mega promotion on the program, touted by the network as the crown jewel of morning TV.
"This was a very competitive interview that all the morning shows were after and, as we do with all of our interview subjects, we'll review the material beforehand and ask all the appropriate questions," Kapps said in a statement issued Thursday.
"This is astounding," one longtime media observer told NewsMax. "You have a major TV network promoting a book with a major news story that has already been discredited. At least in 1999, when St. Martin's Press found out their 'Bush used cocaine' book was false, they had the decency to withdraw it from bookstores."
(All hail the NewMedia! No longer will the American people have to swallow what they are spoonfed by the keepers of the news. Today, the old dinosaurs of the alphabet news are facing extinction, and it scares the livin' daylights out of them. Thank God for FR!)
CBS will simply shrug and move on. They'll try another tack to further their agenda of electing Kerry.
Keep it going CBS, NBC, and Kerry campaign. This is not 'bad' stuff, this is actually all 'great' stuff.
The MSM media and the Kerry campaign/supporters are now driving 1,000 mph head-strong over the credibility cliff with the American public, pushing Bush's poll numbers evn higher by the day.
So PLEEAASSSEEEE DONT STOP!!!!
If some ambitious journalist out there actually traces this back to a Kerry operative, we're talking about a scandal that could eclipse Watergate. I don't think a lot of people appreciate just how devious and evil it is to fabricate career-destroying documents, especially those that pertain to military service, where HONOR is paramount, and you happen to be the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces.
They believe, again, not without reason, that they are now powerful enough to dictate the choice of President of the United States, much as potentates and Medicis could once dictate selection of the Pope.
I don't think they are going to give this idea up because Dan Rather is embarrassed.
As of this morning, CNN and the Boston Globe are still flogging this story. The Times is silent. CBS is on the fence.
They are "in meltdown", at this point, only in our minds.
They may yet crack and push Dan off the sled, but only if we keep up the relentless pressure.
Words have meaning. Recant: To make a formal retraction or disavowal of (a statement or belief to which, one has previously committed onself).
"I categorically deny that I ever told Kitty Kelley that George W. Bush used cocaine at Camp David or that I ever saw him use cocaine at Camp David," ex-Bush sister-in-law Sharon Bush said in a statement issued Thursday.
According to Sharon Bush, she never said anything to recant.
Looks like the tabloids are the place for the real news after all.
Well said. Now. How will CBS wiggle out of this one? I bet they will! I'd put money on it.
DAN CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH
“Dan Rather is the undisputed head pooh-bah of the news division at CBS. Rather has spent 40 years solidifying his position. His former colleague Bernard Goldberg reports that Mr. Rather is extremely sensitive to criticism from any source. In his book "Bias," Mr. Goldberg quotes CBS News President Andrew Haywood: "Dan can't distinguish between mainstream criticism and criticism coming from the extremists. It's all the same to him." Goldberg writes that in the 1980s there was a vice president at CBS whose unofficial title was "vice president in charge of Dan Rather. "His main job was keeping Dan Rather happy." Little wonder, then, that CBS News refuses to acknowledge the liberal bias that is a staple of CBS News. No one can get through to Dan Rather. He is impervious to criticism.”
http://www.bbhq.com/lonely.htm
Dan Rather’s Liberal Bias
http://ratherbiased.com/news/content/view/145/
http://www.mediaresearch.org/projects/rather20th/welcome.asp
http://www.mediaresearch.org/specialreports/2004/report063004_p1.asp
Commander's Son Questions Memos on Bush's Service
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE and JIM RUTENBERG
Published: September 10, 2004
WASHINGTON, Sept. 9 - A day after memos emerged suggesting that George W. Bush received favorable treatment when he was in the National Guard during the Vietnam War, the son of Mr. Bush's squadron commander said he doubted the authenticity of some of the memos his father was said to have written.
The White House, meanwhile, for the second day in a row dismissed renewed questions about Mr.Bush's service as "recycled" and said they were part of a "coordinated attack" by Senator John Kerry, Mr. Bush's Democratic opponent in the presidential campaign, and his associates.
The new fracas over Mr. Bush's service began after CBS News and its program "60 Minutes'' reported on four memos they said were from the personal file of Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, who died 20 years ago. The memos said that Mr. Bush had disobeyed a direct order to go for a physical in 1972 and that Colonel Killian had felt pressure to "sugarcoat'' Mr. Bush's record.
In an interview with The Associated Press on Thursday, the officer's son, Gary Killian, said he doubted that his father had written some of the memos. "I am upset because I think it is a mixture of truth and fiction here,'' Mr. Killian said.
CBS said in a statement that it stood by its story and the memos' authenticity.
"As is standard practice at CBS News, the documents in the '60 Minutes' report were thoroughly examined and their authenticity vouched for by independent experts,'' the statement said.
Still, throughout the afternoon and evening, questions arose about the authenticity of the memos as various forensics experts told news organizations, including The New York Times, that the fonts of the documents resembled those of modern-day word processors, specifically Microsoft Word.
Farrell C. Shiver, a forensic document examiner based in Georgia who said he was a Republican, said the superscript "th's" throughout the memos were "something you would expect to find being done with a computer" and were "not consistent with something that you would expect to find from someone typing a document; they used typewriters in that particular time."
Mr. Shiver also said he was suspicious of the spacing in the memos and the curves in their apostrophes.
But he said that while the font seemed unusual for the period, "that does not prove that the documents are not genuine."
Philip Bouffard, a forensic document specialist from Ohio who created a commonly used database of at least 3,000 old type fonts, said he had suspicions as well. "I found nothing like this in any of my typewriter specimens," said Dr. Bouffard, a Democrat. He also said the fonts were "certainly consistent with what I see in Times Roman," the commonly used Microsoft Word font.
However, Dr. Bouffard said, a colleague had called his attention to similarities between the font in the memos and that of the IBM Selectric Composer of the early 1970's.
But he said it would be unusual for Mr. Bush's commanding officer to have had the IBM machine because of its large size.
Dr. Bouffard said he would see if the fonts match more closely on Friday. "The problem I'm going to run into if this matches and Times Roman matches, to the extent of what we are able to see on these poor miserable copies that are passing around,'' he said, "then I don't think anybody's going to be able to say for sure.''
A senior executive at CBS said said, "We are convinced our source who got the documents had access to them and we trust the source.'' He added, "Can we produce the typewriter they came from in 1972 or 1973? Obviously not.''
The executive said the documents had been "vetted as thoroughly as possible.''
"We did have a number of experts,'' he said, adding that the producers also showed the documents to numerous people who worked with Colonel Killian and who said the memos were consistent with what he thought and representative of the sorts of documents he produced back then.
"It would be unbelievable for a forger to have written documents that could so closely reflect what the people closest to Killian said,'' he said, "that this is his tone of voice, what he thought back then, this is the situation back then. It would be a little odd to think that these things could have just surfaced.''
CBS News executives also produced a document released earlier by the White House about Mr. Bush's service that was clearly from a typewriter and had a superscript "th'' in it. CBS said it proved that some typewriters did indeed have superscript keys. But the characters were hard to make out after so much reproducing of the document, a problem, the CBS News official acknowledged, with the documents in the initial "60 Minutes'' program; those documents were not originals and have been copied repeatedly.
CBS News declined to say how it obtained the memos.
I'm thinking a campaign to send kneepads to CBS and Dan Rather might be in order. After this blatant piece of crap, Dan-O's next gig should be in a mining camp bordello.
This will have an impact when advertisers want to stay as far away as possible form CBS news. When the ad contracts for bulk purchases specifically prohibit showing a clients ad during a CBS news program THEN this will have hit home.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.