November 21, 2005
We are all "Document Experts"
Via PowerLine, I see that "Buckhead," the person who first noticed that the Dan Rather memos were fabrications, has come forward with his name, and with a very interesting (if you like such things) account of how he came to be extremely aware of typography, which made the forgery obvious. (He points out that millions of other people have the same knowledge, and that someone else would have caught it in minutes if he hadn't.) He is disgusted that Mary Mapes is now selling a book and appearing on TV peddling the same damn forgeries, and the same shit-stupid lies about the President...Go here, then click on "Explanation and Comment:"
...In any case, the other side objected to the brief on the grounds that it did not comply with the local court rule specifying that there could be no more than 10 printed characters per inch - a rule of which I was not aware at the time. I filed a brief in response to the objection. Trust me, the prospect of losing a contingency case over a font rule when you have invested years of work in the case will galvanize your attention on the subject of fonts. A pdf scan of a certified copy of that brief is available here at the link above to "1999 Brief." Compare what I said about typewriters, monospaced fonts and proportionally spaced fonts in the brief filed in 1999 with what I said in post # 47, on 9/8/04. I knew what I knew a long time ago, and the brief proves it definitively. So long, conspiracy theory...
We are ALL experts in some sort of document. There is some type of paperwork we handle so frequently that a crude forgery would be blatantly obvious to us. "Document examiners" are widely knowledgeable, but every one of us is more knowledgeable than them on something. For instance, even without the typographic problems, the fabrications were obvious to those familiar with 1970's Air Force documents. The military services are very fussy about the layout, abbreviations, punctuation etc of their paperwork. And each service is different. The use of Army stylistic details in a supposed Air National Guard memo is as conclusive as the typography. Especially since the forger-presumptive had served in the National Guard.
And Col. Killian's family were experts. They knew he never created such things, and that he didn't even know how to type.
I myself am a "document expert" of sorts, because I've tried to reproduce old decorative writing with a graphics program. It's hugely difficult, even just trying to manipulate scanned artwork a little. The different technologies yield a different look. Pixels want to line up neatly, and trying to recreate the slight irregularities of hand-drawn lines (or typewriter key hitting ribbon and paper) is maddening. I even created a font--there are programs that let you do that. (I discovered that I just didn't have the time to do the job right. Designing fonts is a very painstaking process. Alas, when I was young I had heaps of time but no computer. Now the reverse is true).
So anyway, when I saw how the Microsoft Word version lined up perfectly with the supposed typewritten one, I knew the odds against that being an accident were probably greater than the number of protons in the universe.
Posted by John Weidner at November 21, 2005 08:35 AMThis is why the blogosphere is so deadly to the Old Media. Few reporters or editors are experts on anything. Most of their readers are experts on something, but can't talk back.
With the advent of New Media, MSM gatekeepers can no longer filter and control the flow of information. Just as important, they no longer control the direction of flow. For every Rathergate debacle, the backwash of counter-information erodes their credibility.
They will have to get better, or get gone.
Posted by: lyle at November 21, 2005 09:34 AMI'm one of those millions who questioned the variable font immediately. I had just begun professional typesetting in the early seventies and it was almost impossible to have variable type except on very expensive equipment, which seemed unlikely for the Army. Furthermore, on a whim, I reproduced the letter and was startled and surprised to find that it matched exactly. I showed it to my BDS-afflicted deskmate and even surprised him. Then hell broke loose. If only I'd had a blog at that time!!!
Posted by: j.anne at November 21, 2005 10:17 AMLike the above poster, I started typography as a profession at the same time (early 70's), and had also used a variety of then "high-end" typewriters. I had paid no attention to the 60 Minutes 2 piece, and only became aware of the forgery charges a couple days later in the blogosphere.
It took no convincing for me to see that the documents were blatant forgeries typographically speaking. In addition, the substance of the documents was false, and would have made them forgeries even had they been done on a run-of-the-mill electric typewriter of the time.
Posted by: Roderick Reilly at November 21, 2005 02:22 PMI've been involved in personal computing from the beginning, having entered a BASIC word processing program into my TRS-80 (model I) line by line, and using a Xerox Diablo daisywheel to print. When I realized that control codes would allow me to get the best of my printer I learned Z-80 assembly language and wrote a driver to get bidirectional printing to save time.
Fast forward to WordPerfect and laserprinters. In my office in the early 1990's I had to overcome inertia on the part of my co-workers who generally tolerated correspondence in monospaced Courier font. Once on my home computer I tried to tweak a proportional font using printer control codes again to get it more condensed. The results were erratic and unsatisfactory. That's when I discovered that a proportional font on WordPerfect was spaced differently than in a MS Word document. The possibility of the hypothetical 1972 typewriter with Times New Roman would have identical spacing to MS Word 97 is remote, to say the least. So how do we explain the Shadout's insistence that there is no proof her documents were forgeries? I have two theories: One is that she knows good and well that they were forgeries and to keep the possibility of lucrative book sales alive she has to pretend not to know that, trusting that her target audience will never know the difference. The second theory is that she has a vision of truth that is followed by most "journalists", that if you produce 10 experts to swear to "A" and she finds 20 experts to claim "B" then she wins, and the documents are true. If either of my theories is true then no argument, however well presented, will cause her to shift her position.
I lean towards the second theory, by the way. How many times have you seen the MSM "prove" a story by amassing a majority of experts. If they can discredit the other side's witnesses as they did when they were amassing testimony about Lt. Bush's National Guard Service. Their witnesses ("I never saw Bush show up for drill") were always morally more pure than the ones who claimed to remember him. FWIW, I was active duty Army at about the same time and I barely remember six or seven of my closest friends. If Lyndon Johnson's future son-in-law had been in my class I could truthfully testify that I never saw him at drill.
Posted by: Steve Lassey at November 21, 2005 06:25 PMI was active duty Army at about the same time and I barely remember six or seven of my closest friends.
Hell, I was active duty Army for seven years and I berely remember half of the drills I was a part of, more or less the individuals that attended.
Anyone who spends an adult lifetime in work becomes an expert at something, even if it's a small slice of expertise. In olden days - pre-blogosphere - that didn't mean much.
But now there is a mechanism by which those small slices can be accumulated and assembled. There is a brand new means for deriving consensus, and it threatens the ascendency of the elites.
As an artist, I have often felt irritation or dismay when reading academic interpretations of artwork. Few academics have ever painted a picture. They don't understand the process. They build sandcastles of misinterpretation based on their own worldviews. If they had to respond to real experts rather than other academics, they might get closer to the truth. That is, if they care about the truth.
In time, the democratization of information will transform academia as well as the media.
Posted by: lyle at November 23, 2005 06:21 AM300 million people will always know more on any given subject, diffused through the population though the knowledge may be, than any small or large organisation within that population.
Rather why markets work and central planning doesn’t.
Posted by: Tim Worstall at November 23, 2005 08:40 AM
