Posted on 01/05/2005 11:11:59 AM PST by Cyropaedia
Wednesday, January 05, 2005
Letter to Romenesko
Many critics of my article on the CBS memos, the blogs, and the press have obviously not read it. They see it as a "defense of fraudulent reporting" (per James Taranto’s headline in the "Best of the Web" column on OpinionJournal), which it certainly is not, or as CJR’s knee-jerk defense of the old media, which it is not.
Jonathan Last in the Weekly Standard provides an honest critique of my piece. But when he complains that I construct an "insurmountable" standard of proof, I must disagree. Last writes, as others have, that I "could not be persuaded the memos were forged." This is not the case. I began my reporting with the presumption that the documents were forged. Only after weeks of research and reporting did I reach my conclusion — not that the memos are real, but that there is no definitive evidence in the blogs or in the press that supports the conventional wisdom that they are forged. We simply don’t know from the incomplete evidence that’s before us.
Last links to a Yourish.com post to "clear" one typographic expert, Joseph Newcomer, of my criticism of his work. But Yourish’s argument echoes Newcomer’s, and I still think it’s not good enough. Just because you can produce a documents similar to the Killian memos very quickly on the computer does not mean the Killian memos are fake. It certainly does not grant someone — of any qualifications — the ability to say that they are "100 percent" sure of the memos’ origin.
Last complains that I hold up David Hailey’s typographic study to show that the memos might be real. To prove that Hailey’s study was "debunked," Last cites the very bloggers who hounded Hailey — without compelling evidence of fraud. I’m not going to pretend to be qualified to peer review Hailey’s work, but his criticism of the studies that, like Newcomer’s, presumed guilt seems sound. The man was harassed for failing to join the chorus, and that, more than anything, makes his story notable.
Last closes by describing my "sympathies for Burkett." I’m not sure what to say about this, but it’s demonstratable that a double standard was applied to him. A correspondent writes that it is loony to compare Bush to Hitler as Burkett once did. Fair enough. But Burkett was tarred for saying something that other liberals do all the time, loony or not. And that was unfair. This doesn't mean I agree with Burkett or think he's devoid of blame in this affair. Some of the people who were defending Bush during Memogate -- his old Guard friends -- trafficked in equally dubious assertions about Kerry, and that wasn’t reported.
The Powerline blog also has some criticisms worth addressing.
1.) Buck Staudt, who was named in the memos as pressuring to "sugar coat" Bush’s evaluation, had indeed resigned from the Guard before the date on the memos. There are people who say that Staudt did have influence after he left the Guard, though those I’ve spoken to are reluctant to go on the record. Meanwhile, the chief source who disputed CBS’s claim that Staudt held influence after he left the Guard was a Dallas realtor whose connections to Bush defenders in Memogate were not noted in the press. All I’m saying is, in a story like this, the connections and leanings of sources should be noted, whether liberal or conservative.
2.) Powerline writes that the Killian memos do not resemble other 1973 Air Guard documents. Again, I am not saying the memos were produced in 1973. I’m saying we don’t know, and that the fact that the Killian documents don’t resemble some other documents from the period seems a week reed to prove anything.
3.) As for the "apparent coordination between CBS and the Democratic National Committee," there’s only one piece of evidence for this. That is, that Mary Mapes put Bill Burkett in touch with Joe Lockhart. If that’s enough to constitute "apparent coordination," then what of the previously unreported meeting between Bush and his old Guard buddies in March? That’s in my article, but I haven’t seen the speculators run wild with it yet, as they did with the "Kerry connection."
Finally, when Powerline compares CJR’s standard of reporting to what he believes CBS’s was, i.e., that I never dealt with the bloggers’ criticisms, never interviewed living witnesses to the story, and never questioned Burkett’s credibility, he is simply incorrect. I did all of the above and more.
I am dismayed that in the flood of responses to my work, many critics are merely repeating what their favorite blogs say instead of making up their own minds. Indeed, the flood of mail, the bulk of which is no more than personal attacks, confirms much of what I wrote. I welcome criticism which, like the Weekly Standard and Powerline, sticks to the merits of the case. And I encourage anyone to go back, read the blogs and the clips — or do the reporting, make the phone calls, knock on the doors — and draw their own conclusions. Like everybody else, I eagerly await the report of the investigating comission. Whatever they decide about the documents, I am confident in my piece.
--Corey Pein
All they have to do is seem like they do or suggest that they do, right? Or, "we don't know", that's good enough, right? I guess that's good enough for CBS.
It was never up to the bloggers or anybody else to prove that the CBS memo was a forgery.
It was up to CBS to prove that it was legitimate, which they couldn't do, for obvious reasons.
Well, obvious to everybody but an idiot, like Corey Pein.
So after weeks of "objective" detective work this dolt couldn't come to a conclusion. The mere fact that CBS ran with the story without any detective work is part of the evidence they were fraudulent. Doesn't that count for something?
Well, thanks for setting US straight, Corey!
What were they? Were they the same things the Swift Boat Vets were saying that the Kerry campaign had to back track on?
What on earth is a "week reed," Corey, you from the famous CJR?
Why didn't CBS interview Buck Staudt's wife or son about the memos?
Corey, those memos are completely phony. Period. If they were merely Microsoft Word reconstructions of Texas Air National Guard documents from the Sixties and Seventies, Burkett could have answered the forgery allegations by producing the actual documents. Actually, if he'd had genuine documents, he could have released those and completely avoided the accusations. He didn't do that, because he didn't have them, I would respectfully suggest because they never existed. As it is, you have to believe one of two things: Either the Burkett docs were forgeries, or somebody teleported a computer and printer back to that Guard base.
No, he did not; if he had, he would have known that Kilian's son and his ex-wife both decried Killian's secretary's remarks as being FOS.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/
scroll down to:
Journalism In Decline
Corey Pein of the Columbia Journalism Review sent us an email yesterday, with a link to his article in that magazine on the fake 60 Minutes documents. "You may be interested in this," he wrote. We were interested, all right, but we're sorry to report that the article is astonishingly bad.
More like, he is confident in his ignorance.
Dimwit says you can't prove to him the earth is round.
Exactly. But, then again, what else do you expect the MSM to do? They simply cannot engage in business as usual under the withering scrutiny of the blogsphere and FR. So they instead move the goalposts of accountability - since we are scrutinizing them, we therefore must assume the burden of proof - which, in their mind, somehow liberates them to spew whatever nonsense they feel like spewing.
Bush's old Guard friends compared Kerry to Hitler? I must of missed that. All I heard them say was that Bush was a good pilot who did his duty. I don't recall them saying anything about John Kerry.
Ahhhh ... Corey says it is so, so it must be so.
Great logic here. A CBS employee puts a source in touch with a person from the DNC (Lockhart) = President talking to friends. If it were Fox that arranged for the President and his buddies to meet this would be analogous, otherwise this is just plain silly.
I'd like to know, too.
The guy is a nut. I KNOW they are fake. Fonts and verbage aside, they are in a format that the Air Force DID NOT CREATE UNTIL 1992!
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