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The Chicago Tribune Quietly Swaps Out AP Article That Ignores Questions Surrounding Authenticity of CBS Memos
By Beth and Terry
A Threshold -55 examination of the Chicago Tribune website reveals that the newspaper appears to have quietly removed all references to a September 10th front page article that called into question President Bush's military service during Vietnam.
The article, "Questions Raised About Bush Guard Service" has been completely replaced with a new article titled, "Bush Piloted Guard Trainers Before He Quit". The new one tries to paint the President as a poor flyer who frequently required multiple approaches to land his jet.
The removed article makes passing mention of the doubts surrounding the authenticity of the CBS Dan Rather/memo debacle. But in a stunning twist of partisan reporting the Tribune plays down the doubts as they continue their never ending quest to discredit President Bush. Read the Threshold cached copy in full to see the hatchet job in action.
The bias of the AP article or that of the Chicago Tribune is nothing new to readers of Threshold. We wonder if it is possible that the newspaper changed the link to prevent people from making references to the original report. Perhaps the AP article is even too biased for the Tribune.
Eventually people outside the blog world are going to start questioning the credibilty of the major liberal media news outlets. This event will be long overdue.
An online search of the Tribune's web site by author, title and section shows the article to have been cleansed in its entirety from the Tribune web site. This is highly unusual considering that it was published last evening.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/searc...aised+About+Bush+Guard+Service&target=article
Our on-line search for other Tribune writers such as Jill Zuckman returned many more results as expected. It appears that all of her articles for the past week are easily obtained by simply searching off her name.
The Chicago Tribune web addressing scheme is pretty simple to understand. Every unique page on their website has a url (web address) that is encoded with a key. The key is encoded in a special way to allow for web based searches, e-mail forwarding and printing by the Tribune back end systems.
For example:
The September 7th story we mentioned in yesterdays article had the following web address:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-0409070190sep07,1,2112980.story?coll=chi-news-hed
The important part of this address is the chi-0409070190sep07 part. This tells us the date it was published and a tag that identified it as a Tribune article "chi" for search purposes. The keys vary based on the originating source; in this case "chi" which represents a Chicago Tribune article. Likewise ats-ap" represents an AP article, etc. The most important aspect of these keys is they must be unique; one key per article and vice-versa.
The beauty of this whole picture is that the Internet Explorer "save as" functionality embeds the originating URL in the HTML source code. Thus we can see the original reference for any page we saved locally.
The following synopsis breaks down the address for our cached copy of "Questions Raised About Bush Guard Service" article.
Originating Source:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ats-ap_top10sep09,1,1343186.story?coll=chi-news-hed
Printer Friendly Format:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/...0sep09,1,600625,print.story?coll=chi-news-hed
"E-Mail This Story" address:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/...0sep09,1,932869,email.story?coll=chi-news-hed
Try e-mailing the above link to your self and see first hand how they have pulled off the swap.
Once again the liberal press is playing tricks to try and perpetuate a fraud on the upcoming election.
Once again the blogosphere will not let them get away with it!
Posted by bethandterry at September 10, 2004 03:54 AM
JIHADTHIS said:OOOOOOPS, too late!
It's amazing how this exploded over the net in less then 24 hours. The forgery is the lead story on ABC news radio, it's in the NY POST, WaPo, etc.
It ain't going away, hell CBS even has a piece on their site and they are the target LOL
freeandfun1 said:Rush is talking about how the bloggers, chat rooms and message boards on the internet trumped the major networks on this and called the forgeries before anybody else. So yes, the Internet IS GRAND! :hail:
CSM said:yeah,good thing old Al invented it for us, eh!
ScreamingEagle said:Ain't freedom of the net grand?
Bonnie said:It will be interesting to see just how Dan and his colleagues at CBS dig their way out of this now. You had Rather this morning talking to reporters about how these documents are 100% true.......Without jumping the gun here I would say that even if he and CBS recants and apologizes (not likely) thier reputations and careers should be over. But that would be in a perfect world
Bonnie said:It will be interesting to see just how Dan and his colleagues at CBS dig their way out of this now. You had Rather this morning talking to reporters about how these documents are 100% true.......Without jumping the gun here I would say that even if he and CBS recants and apologizes (not likely) thier reputations and careers should be over. But that would be in a perfect world
rtwngAvngr said:And while all that is going on, Terry Mcauliffe is out there saying Karl Rove is behind it all. They're cracking up big time. THIS IS AWESOME!
Bonnie said:You know I love politics but I never knew it could be this much fun! Im not sure what Im liking more, the imploding of Kerry and his cronies, or the imploding of the liberal media
CSM said:yeah,good thing old Al invented it for us, eh!
For one of them, the 8th graders started laughing, saying that I had turned them onto blogs in 6th grade, they knew of ones I'd never heard of! All of them had turned their parents on. I grant anyone, these were my brightest, ie. most curious students. (When the other teacher left the room, one of the kids asked me if I thought Mrs. T could 'handle' the language? I responded that it was 'her problem.' LOL, none of them wondered if I could handle the language.)
fubar said:The real news here, besides the Fun of watching Rather squirm, is the display of momentum and mass that the internet & talk radio are displaying.
Even if CBS is dead right, they have just seen godzilla stomping right through their hometown.
I cant add a thing to the forgery controversy, even in my capacity as a lily-gilder. The efforts of the Powerline guys and Charles Johnson speak for themselves, and you ought to read them before you make up your mind.
Is there anyone out there who doesnt know what I mean? Possible. Its the old non-contiguous information stream issue again. I mentioned the story to someone today a friend who has his ideas about politics, of course, but doesnt follow the braided strands of intrigue that thread through the blogosphere. Hes an independent. Ventura voter. Hed heard about the latest round of National Guard stories, and he couldnt care less. I told him about the forgery rumors; he was amused. Did it change his opinion of CBS? Not really, because he didnt care for them one way or the other. Dan Rathers news was the Daily Show without the laughs.
Anecdotal evidence, of course, take it for what its worth. But I think the number of people who regard the evening news as straight truth delivered by disinterested observers, can be numbered in the high dozens. Blogs havent toppled old media. The foundations of Old Media were rotten already. The new media came along at the right time. Put it this way: youve see films of old buildings detonated by precision demolitionists. First you see the puffs of smoke then the building just hangs there for a second, even though every column that held it up has been severed. Weve been living in that second for years, waiting for the next frame. Well, here it is. Roll tape. Down she goes. And when the dust settles we will be right back where we were 100 years ago, with dozens of fiercely competitive media outlets throwing elbows to earn your pennies.
In retrospect, TV looks like a big smothering quilt: it killed the afternoon papers, forced the survivors to consolidate; it reshaped the news cycle to fit its needs, shifted the emphasis to the visual. It fed off the Times and the Post and other surviving papers, which had institutionalized the Watergate and Vietnam templates as the means by which we understand events. The old-line media, like its Boomer components, got old, and like the Boomers, it preferred self-congratulation to self-reflection. And so the Internet had it for lunch, because the Internet does not have to schedule 17 meetings to develop a strategy for impactfully maximizing brand leverage in emerging markets; the Internet does not have to worry about how a decision will affect ones management trajectory; the Internet smells blood and leaps, and that has turned the game around, for better or worse. So were back to where we were in 1904 except that the guys on the corner shouting WUXTRY, WUXTRY arent grimy urchins selling the paper theyre the people who wrote the damn thing, too.
I repeat my earlier obvious advice to middle-market newspapers: go local.
And yes, I carried a briefcase in college. I also wore a tie all the time. This is why it doesnt hurt if people call me a dork now. Oh, I think. You have no idea.
September 10, 2004
Rather's Source Says Documents Are A Fraud
Via Instapundit, the CBS meltdown continues. Just hours after Dan Rather told the nation that he personally vouched for the authenticity of the Killian memos due to the preponderance of supporting evidence surrounding them, the "preponderance" told ABC News that he thinks the documents are forged:
Retired Maj. General Hodges, Killian's supervisor at the Grd, tells ABC News that he feels CBS misled him about the documents they uncovered. According to Hodges, CBS told him the documents were "handwritten" and after CBS read him excerpts he said, "well if he wrote them that's what he felt."
Hodges also said he did not see the documents in the 70's and he cannot authenticate the documents or the contents. His personal belief is that the documents have been "computer generated" and are a "fraud".
So now we find out that not only did CBS fail to show the documents to the one witness who could have verified them, but they also told him that the memos were handwritten -- which would have made Hodges more likely to accept them as genuine, since everyone who knew Col. Jerry Killian knew he didn't type. This is what CBS said earlier about how important Hodges was in certifying the documents as genuine:
"This report was not based solely on recovered documents, but rather on a preponderance of evidence, including documents that were provided by unimpeachable sources, interviews with former Texas National Guard officials and individuals who worked closely back in the early 1970s with Colonel Jerry Killian and were well acquainted with his procedures, his character and his thinking," the network said in a statement reported on its Web site.
First the documents came from Killian's personal files, until Killian's family insisted that Killian kept no personal files, and didn't type to boot. Then CBS trotted out Major General Bobby Hodges's testimony that the documents accurately reflected Killian's thinking at the time, which the Killian family also refuted. Now we find out that Hodges never saw the documents, were told they were handwritten, and only said that if CBS had notes in Killian's handwriting then the notes must have reflected Killian's thoughts at the time, which is nothing more than a common-sense statement.
The house that Edward R Murrow built is fast crumbling all around one man: Dan Rather. How much longer will this go on before CBS has enough?
Posted by Captain Ed at 10:34 PM
fuzzykitten99 said:Call me sadistic, mean, cruel, whatever, but this thing with the forgeries, I found to be a sigh of relief. I was starting to get worried that Kerry might in fact win the election, only because when you lie to people enough, and make accusations, getting people worked up and play to their emotions and fears, they start believing you. The polls that cam out after the RNC made me feel better, but this forgery thing now is getting people's attention that the liberals are getting despirate enough to start using dirty tactics to win. And all it does is make them look bad. I am glad I no longer associate myself with the DFL. I am glad I got out while I did and realized I had more in common with conservatives than I thought. Contrary to what the DFL will tell you, the Republican party is not the party of the rich. John Kerry is worth several times what Bush is, yet he is a D'Rat.
