Posted on 10/10/2004 6:10:12 AM PDT by AmericanMade1776
The recent brouhaha over the use of forged memos in a Sept. 8 60 Minutes report on Bush's military service record began when a blogger using the name Buckhead posted a detailed analysis of the "proportionally spaced fonts" in the memos less than two hours after the broadcast. Such fonts weren't in common use in the 1970s, Buckhead explained, so the memos must be faked.
It turns out that Buckhead is Harry MacDougald, an Atlanta lawyer and longtime GOP activist (he helped draft the petition urging the Arkansas Supreme Court to disbar Bill Clinton). How MacDougald, 46, came by his expert knowledge of typefaces used when he was in his early teens remains a mystery, since he has refused to be interviewed about where he acquired the information in the posting.
Blogging's influence is difficult to measure, says Dan Shea. He is an associate professor of political science at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pa., and founder of the Center for Political Participation.
"I think it's a relatively small group that's involved in blogs. You heard all this stuff about (Howard) Dean's campaign, that it was this radical movement. Then Dean got hammered in Iowa.
"What they didn't think about was that the average voter in Iowa is probably a 47-year-old housewife, and she doesn't go on and blog until 2 a.m."
(Excerpt) Read more at sptimes.com ...
Too bad Springsteen et. al. didn't start campaigning earlier--then we could have seen them blown up in Team America as well ;-)
Idiotarians all of em. Sad thing I still like some of his old songs.
Curiosity and fair journalism is extinct.
Reporters now sit at their stations eagerly waiting for the latest set of talking point to be faxed from DNC headquarters.
The only free press is here on the internet.
But they will try to control this arena in due time also.
"What they didn't think about was that the average voter in Iowa is probably a 47-year-old housewife, and she doesn't go on and blog until 2 a.m."
Nonsense. I live in Oklahoma, I am 53, and don't go on and blog until I get up at 5 am...
So unless you are a memeber of the MSM, you better live in a box...
Well, I have on good authority that Dan Rather masturbated as a teenage boy...oooooo, he's a Bad Man.
The author is a flipping moron. There's no mystery. *ANY*one who took a typing class back in the day learned how to count spaces to center a heading- a procedure predicated on fixed-width fonts. *ANY*one with cursory internet skills can google up tons of information about fonts... fixed width, proportional, serif and sans, kerning and leading. It's a piece of cake except for amateur "journalists" like Colette.
Just watch them, the dems are going to start working on taxing the net next term of congress, and try to weed out some of those bloggers.
"How MacDougald ... came by his expert knowledge of typefaces used when he was in his early teens remains a mystery"
The word is "research", Colette. Journalists used to do a lot of this.
But if you get your version of reality emailed to you everyday by the DNC, you don't need to do research, do you?
You see....LadyDoc...."they" just do not understand us. "They" are trying to paint us with one broad stroke. "They" are underestimating us, just as Kerry did in Debate...when Kerry "assumed" that no one in the townhall meeting was making over 200,000 a year.
ping for later
The writer reveals the conceit that if they don't know about fonts then a member of the 'great unwashed' couldn't possibly acquire such vast knowledge.
"they"...are all too assuming of who they consider us all to be uneducated, mindless, sheeple.
Who makes up this stuff...that the AVERAGE VOTER in Iowa is a 47 year old housewife???????? Forget that she goes online to blog at 2 am.
The writer doesn't want to address the elephant in the room, ie: WHY Budkhead was there to fact check, WHY there are so many to pick up his thread, WHY Rush and Hannity et al have an audience: a media that no longer cares about "facts" themselves!!!!!
sent her a reply....
Dear Ms. Bancroft
-- How MacDougald, 46, came by his expert knowledge of typefaces used when he was in his early teens remains a mystery, since he has refused to be interviewed about where he acquired the information in the posting. --
Dear Ms. Bancroft,
Mr. MacDougald would have come of age in 1978, at which time he would have been introduced, either via scholastic or military paperwork, to the world of forms. Given his occupation, I can only assume that this association continued unabated for several years (a la, Law School).
As a member of the printing and publishing community since the late 80's, I, too, was immediately suspicious. I don't have a Blog, but I do have first hand knowledge of the mind numbing bother that was proportional typesetting prior to the advent of the personal computer.
I also have some first hand knowledge of replacing blocks of copy in newsletters and such. Even when the type was PROFESSIONALLY set, to match leading, kerning, and line breaks required much time (and paid my salary). So to imagine that MS Word would, by happy coincidence, match to a 30 year old document to easily and cleanly does not pass MY smell test.
Additionally, you must keep in mind that most Blogs are heavily interactive. I have no firsthand knowledge of MacDougalds actions or insights, but I would speculate that he printed or posted the document from CBS's website, whereupon someone with military or publishing backgrounds would have pointed out the inconsistencies, either personally or via the Blog (proportional fonts vs. typewriter for ANG Memos, Army vs. Air Force terminology). Whereupon MacDougald would have begun to post his suspicions, and the floodgates were opened. I was one of those who, seeing the suspicions on a political-talk site, and with a spare half hour and some curiosity, took the CBS file, retyped it, made a new PDF, opened both in photoshop, and frankly was immediately incensed that someone would try to pass off such an obvious fake.
The question shouldn't be on his shoulders in any case. I'm a graphic designer, with a printshop background, and the faux pas was damn near instantaneously apparent. I would suggest that the problem here is NOT the Blog, but the media culture that is either a) ignorant, or b) biased and combines that with a 'we're the arbiters of truth' mindset that does not allow for criticism (the Rather apology? "Yes, the evidence is forged, but I still believe the story").
To turn your argument on its head, I find it amazing that Dan Rather, a JOURNALIST who was active in the 70's would not recall that, for anything short of published work, you used a typewriter. With monospaced type, and few if any 'special' characters. Or mayhap he was simply never one of the common folk (perhaps his Marine enlistment papers were produced on the amazing IBM Selectric Composer).
As to the rest of your column, why, I must presume the veracity of R.W. Apple, The Dixie Chicks, Bruce Springsteen and Wonkette to be unchallenged. After all, MacDougald was the only one whose knowledge base was questioned. Ah, but wait. They're all coming from the left
side of the political spectrum. And you accept their statements without question or condemnation.
No doubt that's just another of those happy coincidences in 'journalism.'
< aka. Mr. Thorne >
Columbus, Ohio
And now I see that I forgot to use a possessive apostrophe! Noooooo!
[Anti MSM Kool-Aid sarcasm torpedo ARMED. FIRE!]
'Great unwashed' ?? Hmmmph! As Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes said,
"I took a bath just last week."
BTW I bet MacDougald doesn't even make $200,000 a year, either. So THERE!
Yes, they are actually jealous of the blogosphere.
Look how long their news cycle took to come up with
even this low-level (name-calling) response
That's probably because they spent this long trying to fudge
the memos on typewriters first, and then discovered
we were RIGHT. So they resorted to name-calling.
I am impressed, but I can only imagine what the cold hard facts presented to Ms Bancroft will do to her! I visualize Ms Bancroft reading your letter, her head swirling and nearly exploding from the facts. Excellent letter!
bump
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