First Swiftboats Resurrected, Now Rathergate

[Annie]

Links at site, as is the 'document':

http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110008483

'60 Minutes,' 21 Months Later
Poor Mary Mapes. She's the "60 Minutes" producer who came up with the phony "documents" the newsmagazine used in an effort to make some long-forgotten point or another about how President Bush was unpatriotic because he served in the National Guard. And she still insists the documents were real! Here she is, posting yesterday on the Puffington Host:

When our story aired on September 8, 2004, it was savaged in an unprecedented outpouring of political vitriol. The Bush administration was then at the height of its ability to summon a terrifying whirlwind of criticism from right wing bloggers, hate talk radio yackers, FOX News "reporters," conservative columnists, and those hollering people whose heads always appear in little boxes on cable discussion shows. None of these critics cared anything about the facts of the story, only about their politics.

They claimed that CBS used forged documents and they repeated that lie so often that it stuck. The mainstream media picked it up, repeating bloggers' criticisms without making any serious effort to investigate the story. But then that would have required real legwork, something that very few were willing to do on this subject.

As for document analysis, it is a mind-numbing and arcane discipline, an imperfect undertaking reserved for courtroom use, not for headlines or Internet political battles. Document analysis is certainly not meant to be done at 11 o'clock at night by someone with no training or experience sitting in front of a glowing computer nursing a grudge and spoiling for a fight. But that's precisely how the right's attack against Dan Rather and CBS News was launched.

That first anonymous analyst (who turned out to be a Republican activist lawyer) raised questions about the memo using only a single shot of a faxed document digitally transmitted to his computer screen. Those kinds of transmissions radically change the way a document looks. His analysis was worthless.

Oh, those terrifying critics with their glowing computers! But of course there was nothing arcane about this; at least one of the documents was an obvious fake. This image, generated by blogger Charles Johnson, oscillates between the "memo" and an identical one typed on Microsoft Word using the default settings for font, tab stops, etc.:

Mapes is right, of course, that faxing a document changes the way it looks, which is why the "original" is somewhat fuzzy. But faxing does not make a document created on a 1970s typewriter look exactly like a fax of a Microsoft Word document!

Mapes's claims are too much even for many of the Angry Left PuffHo commenters. You have to feel sorry for someone who can't face the obvious truth that she was snookered by a source into believing what she wanted to believe. At what point, though, must we view this self-deception as willful and Mary Mapes as a perpetrator rather than a mere victim of journalistic fraud?

 

[red states rule]

What ekllse is new? This, like so many other "stories" is another example of the liberal media "reporting" WHAT they want to haapen - not what happened

 

[PsuedoGhost]

What ekllse is new? This, like so many other "stories" is another example of the liberal media "reporting" WHAT they want to haapen - not what happened

FFS, everyone does the same thing.

 

[nt250]

FFS, everyone does the same thing.

Actually, that's not true.

The first website I go to every single day is this one:

http://home.iwon.com/?v=1

It's kind of like a Yahoo! wannabe site that has news from the AP, Reuters, all kinds of different sources. You can win $10,000 just by registering and reading the site. I've been reading it for almost 7 years and have never won anything, but what the hell. News is news, so I figure I might as well read it there. Maybe someday I will win the 10 grand.

There's a page at iwon called "Top Stories". When the memogate story first broke there were four different stories at iwon under the Top Stories banner. Four. All about the memos that "proved" George W. Bush was AWOL, incompetent, and that his service in the National Guard was a sham. Four.

When CBS News retracted the story about 10 days later, the only article about it was under the Entertainment banner, and the main gist of that story was about how it had damaged Dan Rathers career.

The media in this country is very liberal. Anyone who says otherwise is delusional. Just the treatment of the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth during the last election is proof of that. So is the way the media went after George W. Bush's military record, and totally ignored John Kerry's is proof of that.

They may all do the same thing. But they are certainly not treated the same by the media.

 

[red states rule]

Actually, that's not true.

The first website I go to every single day is this one:

http://home.iwon.com/?v=1

It's kind of like a Yahoo! wannabe site that has news from the AP, Reuters, all kinds of different sources. You can win $10,000 just by registering and reading the site. I've been reading it for almost 7 years and have never won anything, but what the hell. News is news, so I figure I might as well read it there. Maybe someday I will win the 10 grand.

There's a page at iwon called "Top Stories". When the memogate story first broke there were four different stories at iwon under the Top Stories banner. Four. All about the memos that "proved" George W. Bush was AWOL, incompetent, and that his service in the National Guard was a sham. Four.

When CBS News retracted the story about 10 days later, the only article about it was under the Entertainment banner, and the main gist of that story was about how it had damaged Dan Rathers career.

The media in this country is very liberal. Anyone who says otherwise is delusional. Just the treatment of the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth during the last election is proof of that. So is the way the media went after George W. Bush's military record, and totally ignored John Kerry's is proof of that.

They may all do the same thing. But they are certainly not treated the same by the media.

Look how the liberal media is now spiing the Dems loss in the Ca 50th

Before Tuesday, this was the election to watch. This election would show if the folks were mad at Republicans and if they go to the Dems. This election would tell us if the Dems will take back the House

Now, after Tuesday, well...... this really does not mean much. They expected they Republicans to hold the seat.

Libs are in mourning