Straying Thoughts

Postponed

According to Captain Ed, the noon statement that was postponed until 3:00, then 5:00, then 6:15, will now be at 6:30. I think they're carving their own typeface out of a bar of soap.

Point/Counterpoint

When all these bloggers and experts layout their case for forgery and CBS (the Official Network of the Democratic National Committe) just responds with "we believe it and you're all partisan hacks in your pajamas", I'm reminded of the bit that Dan Akroyd and Jane Curtain used to do on Saturday Night Live years ago. Jane would be a political commentator making a carefully reasoned point and Dan Akroyd would always respond, "Jane, you ignorant slut!"

Odd thing is, they were parodying a segment that used to appear on 60 Minutes.

The Same Old Same Old From CBS

On NRO, Anne Morse has a story on a piece CBS did in 1988 concerning Vietnam veterans. It turns out that many of the men CBS had portrayed as scarred by their service in Vietnam hadn't been in Vietnam.

Steve Southards, who'd claimed to be a 16-year-old Navy SEAL assassin, had actually served as an equipment repairman stationed far from combat. Later transferred to Subic Bay in the Philippines, Steve spent most of his time in the brig for repeatedly going AWOL.

And George Gruel, who claimed he was traumatized by the sight of his friend being chopped to pieces by a propeller? Navy records reveal that a propeller accident did take place on the Ticonderoga when Gruel was aboard — but that he wasn't around when it happened. During Gruel's tour, the ship had been converted to an antisubmarine warfare carrier which operated, not on "secret mission" along the Vietnam coast, but on training missions off the California coastline. Nevertheless, Burkett notes, Gruel receives $1,952 a month from the Veterans Administration for "psychological trauma" related to an event he only heard about.

Mikal Rice — the anguished vet who claimed to have cradled his dying buddy in his arms — actually spent his tour as a guard with an MP company at Cam Ranh Bay. He never saw combat. Neither did Terry Bradley, who was not the "fighting sergeant" he'd claimed to be. Instead, military records reveal he served as an ammo handler in the 25th Infantry Division and spent nearly a year in the stockade for being AWOL. That's good news for the hundreds of Vietnamese civilians Bradley claimed to have slaughtered. But it doesn't say much for Dan Rather's credibility.

This information was available but CBS couldn't be bothered. The information fit the story that CBS wanted to tell so there was no need to check it.

Or maybe — despite a preponderance of the evidence — [Rather] considered the sources of these tales of Vietnam atrocities "unimpeachable." As angry Vietnam veterans began calling CBS to complain about the factual inaccuracies of The Wall Within, Perry Wolff, the executive producer who wrote the documentary, claimed that "No one has attacked us on the facts." Despite the growing evidence that he'd been had, Rather also continued to defend the documentary — which is now part of CBS's video history series on the Vietnam War.

This might explain the way they are continuing to stonewall on the forged memos--it worked for them before.

Update On Booing

An update on the false AP report that an audience booed at a Bush rally when President Bush announced that former President Clinton was ill:
Jeff Gannon at Talon News asked Scott Lindlaw about his report of booing at the rally:

Tom Curley, AP president and CEO, was asked by Talon News to explain the circumstances surrounding the correction.

Curley said, "The reporter and a couple others standing with him thought they heard booing. After checking of tapes, they decided it was oohs, not boos."

Curley also confirmed that Hays was not present at the Wisconsin rally, but was in New York at the time of the event. The reference to "booing" came from material provided by Lindlaw. Talon News confronted Lindlaw on Friday about the discrepancy in his reporting of the event.

When asked if he heard booing as he reported, he replied, "I did."

Lindlaw declined to be interviewed but insisted that his reporting was accurate.

Lindlaw said, "What I had to say I put in the wire."

Lindlaw refused to answer any other questions about the report. Lindlaw provided no explanation for making a charge that would create a negative impression of President Bush and his supporters.

Some have criticized Lindlaw's previous work for having an anti-Bush slant. In July, he wrote an article that used detailed quotes from a meeting of Washington, DC conservatives that was "off the record." The original source of the quotes was not Lindlaw, since he was not present at the meeting.

His story, titled "Some Key Conservatives Uneasy About Bush," suggested that because one of the 150 participants in the meeting had expressed misgivings about the Iraq war, conservatives are perhaps turning away from the president. Lindlaw quotes two men from Missouri to support his thesis, one of whom is undecided about which candidate he may vote for.

Lindlaw is sure he heard booing but, according to Powerline, Lindlaw wears earplugs during noisy rallies and he asked another AP reporter if he had heard booing and that reporter said no. So how did Lindlaw hear the boos and who were the other reporters who heard them?

Talon News is GOPUSA, a conservative news and information site.

Via Tim Blair.

Why?

I find myself wondering why CBS and the DNC picked the issue of George Bush's National Guard service on which to make some sort of last stand. I would think a great many Americans couldn't care less what George Bush did 30 years ago. Whether they support him or not, they care about what he did the last 4 years and what he might do the next 4 years. There's no real story here. Jed Babbin in National Review and Byron York in The Hill describe Bush's service. He fulfilled his service and earned an honorable discharge. There's no story here.

Is this the Bush Derangement Syndrome that Charles Krauthammer predicted:

the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency -- nay -- the very existence of George W. Bush.

I didn't vote for Bush in 2000 and I wasn't happy with the outcome of the election, but I didn't lose my mind. Of course, I was never an actual Democrat. I can see where a true believer would be more upset, but a lot of these people have clearly lost their grip on reality. They talk of a stolen election even though the liberal media counted the ballots in Florida and declared Bush the winner. They feel they've been cheated and it's ok to cheat to get back what's rightfully theirs. It's a sense of entitlement mixed with a need for revenge.

Another idea to consider is the Left's mistrust of the military. Clearly, the Scoop Jackson wing of the Democratic party is not in ascendancy, if it even still exists (I don't think Joe Lieberman, Ed Koch, and Zell Miller can make a wing all by themselves). The new Deaniacs are the old McGovernites and they have this strong pacifist trait. I don't think they understand most Americans' respect and love of the military as the preservers of our great freedom in a world that still has too little of it. They think it's about a love of guns and bombs and uniforms, they think of it as militarism bordering on fascism. That's why they're so tone-deaf. They see it as a pose and since Kerry can imitate this pose, they feel they've settled doubts about their attitude towards the military. "You want a hero, we've got a hero, medals and everything." Then they belittle Bush's Guard service, ignoring that there are Guardsmen in places like Iraq and that the Reserves are an integral part of our defense strategy. And they don't think anyone will notice the blatant hypocrisy of disparaging Guard service when they ran an actual draft-dodger in Clinton. They exalt Kerry and the vets who support him but dismiss as liars and hacks the Swift vets. People draw the conclusion that the Democrats' sudden love affair with military service is a passing fancy.

By their thinking, Kerry should have been a lock. Everyone's talking about war. We need a war hero. Kerry's a war hero. But people didn't embrace Kerry as the Democrats thought they would. So they keep drawing the distinction over and over again, hoping people will get it. "See, Kerry = military hero, Bush not. I don't understand. Why doesn't the public fall in line?"

Who's The Source?

I'm beginning to wonder if there's coordination between CBS (or at least Rather) and the DNC. Maybe everyone else has already assumed this, but I don't see anyone talking about it. From The Captain's post & ABC's report, it seems likely that CBS had knowledge that their memos at least questionable. They clearly cherry-picked their experts, taking the ones they could get positve statements from and cutting the ones who had doubts. They didn't get hoaxed; they deliberately obscured the truth.

Add to this the DNC ad campaign that in essence builds off of CBS's report. From The Kerry Spot on NRO

CAN TERRY MCAULIFFE READ? [09/14 08:45 PM]

Can Terry McAuliffe read? The Washington Post, I mean. The CBS memos are getting picked apart by every expert under the sun, the experts CBS cited are saying they didn't really authenticate the documents, ABC News is quoting skeptical experts who say CBS ignored them, and McAuliffe decides to unveil a new web ad and ad campaign attacking Bush on his National Guard service? An ad that uses footage of the now-discredited CBS report?

It was known last week that the DNC was going to run these "Fortunate Son" ads. Why would Rather go forward with a tainted report and why would the DNC go forward with ads that built off of it?

It's one thing to CBS to be biased, but to put forth a fraudulent report and coordinate it with a presidential election campaign to influence an election is beyond acceptable. Who gave CBS the memos? Was there coordination with the DNC or the Kerry campaign? If the DNC or the Kerry campaign is the source, where did they get them from? Or have I gone to tin-foil hat land?

No Longer Priests Of A Higher Truth

There’s a reformation of sorts going on in the Church of the News Media. For decades, reporters, journalists, anchors, the priests of journalism, have been the sole source for news. They presented us with the news and if they left something out, well, it must not be news.

This last week, it became apparent that things were changing. There was an AP story that said “Bush's audience of thousands in West Allis, Wis., booed. Bush did nothing to stop them,” when President Bush announced that former President Clinton had been hospitalized. Only it didn’t happen. People present at the rally got on their blogs or e-mailed those who had blogs and told them it was a lie; people called and e-mailed AP and their local papers and stations demanding a retraction. AP changed, then dropped the line, then, much later, issued a retraction. No apology, of course. No explanation of how this happened or assurances that it would not re-occur. Just take it on faith.

This week, of course, we have Rathergate. Dan Rather and 60 Minutes II put forth a story concerning President Bush’s National Guard service 30 years ago, displaying memos that supposedly prove did not fulfill his obligation. As with the AP story, people who knew better were questiong received truth. People who knew typefaces and printing, people who knew the military and how they do business, people who knew Jerry Killian, the man who supposedly wrote the memos were all posting and e-mailing. Soon a picture emerged that did not match the revealed word of CBS and Dan Rather. Up until CBS’ evening news on Friday, CBS could have said that they were a victim of a hoax, but with their totally inadequate defense of the tainted memos, they’re now perpetrating a fraud. Dan Rather brushed aside the objections of hundreds of knowlegeable people as partisan rumor-mongers and insisted if any real problems turn up, “we’ll let you know”. He was attempting to persuade people on the basis of authority, not realizing that his authority is what’s in question. There are many people who have more experience with typography than Dan Rather and the rest of us can read their opinions for ourselves. Heresy!

The high priests warn us about the internet. “Don’t go there. Some of those people are partisan and there’s no guarantee the facts will be right”; they gloss over their own partisanship and factual shortcomings. We’re not supposed to know the priests themselves have fallen short, but we do.

The media talk about checks and balances, but when there is such uniformity of opinion as there is in journalism, the checks and balances do not work. If two people are standing next to each other on a street corner and they see an accident, they’ll tell much the same story. It’s only if one of them moves to a different corner that you’ll get a different perspective.

Then of course, there is the higher truth that many in the news media serve. Columnists writing about Michael Moore’s mockumentary would often say that, although individual facts might wrong, it told a higher truth. It’s a matter of faith, the belief in things disproven. Dan Rather believes that George Bush lied about his National Guard service, so if he has to present a few fraudulent memos like a fake miracle or dubious relic of a saint, that’s allowed, because it serves the purpose of bringing us to Dan’s truth. If Scott Lindlaw of AP believes that it’s his job to insure that George Bush doesn’t get re-elected, then inserting some boos in a story is the lesser of two evils, the greater evil being to allow us to make up our own minds.

It’s that arrogance, that paternalism, that condescension that has people increasingly questioning the priests of journalism. People are not only questiong the truths the media has been handing down, they’re questioning the media. Many feel that the “Kerry’s service vs Bush’s service” issue has been rigged. No critic of Kerry’s record is good enough; 250 Swift vets are dismissed as partisan liars. “Don’t bother,” the media priests assure us; “we’ve checked them out so you don’t have to.” On the other hand, as demonstrated by CBS and the Boston Globe, no critic of the President is too biased or incredible. Fund raisers for the Democrats? No problem; we just won’t mention it. People who change their story whenever facts rear their ugly heads? Come on in; we’ll take the version that fits the story we want to tell. The only gatekeeping being done is to cut out what departs from received truth, the heresy of forged memos and relatives who say Killian didn’t type and anyone who liked Bush or saw him in Alabama.

I have no faith in the mainstream media. Any story that touches on politics will be, at best, half true, and I have to sift through it and double-check to be sure of even that. I think I’ve probably got a lot of company. Is the media content with this situation? They must be, because I don’t see them doing anything to change it. I run into indignant essays like Edward Wasserman’s, condemning any who criticize the media as “a free-floating cadre of rightist warriors”. Jonathan Klein claims "Bloggers have no checks and balances . . . [it's] a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas”; I don’t know what the bloggers are wearing (nor do I want to), but they handed Dan Rather his head this week and all the sneering by Klein and Wasserman and Rather won’t change that. They can stand haughtily at the altar they’ve built to their profession, but they’ll find fewer faithful in the pews.

Possible Forgeries And (In)Credible Witnesses?

Were the documents in the Boston Globe story on President Bush's National Guard service forged? The main point of contention is that the memos used in the story use proportional font and other features, which would be unusual before word processors and printers. There's a great deal of information out there:

Powerline has a post that they've been updating all day with information from readers about what kind of typewriters the Air National Guard might have been using in the early seventies, how were orders recorded, a comparison of signatures, etc.

The Kerry Spot has a list of issues at the 09/09 04:54 PM post (they don't seem to have permalinks).

Little Green Footballs has an image of one of the Boston Globe documents and an image of a document he did in Microsoft Word. He lays one over and they appear identical.

I don't know if the documents were forged, but I think this does point to an advantage of the 'net and blogging. Look how much information you can pull together, how many different points of view you can get in a short period of time. Clerk/typists in the Air Force, a former Selectric repairman from IBM. Good work on the part of Powerline and their readers and others who are doing such good work on this matter.

Clarification: The Boston Globe story was based on CBS's Sixty Minutes report.

Update: Bill at INDC did some legwork and asked a document expert to look at the documents in question. He has some serious doubts.

Update2: I've been looking over the memos and I have to admit, I wouldn't have picked up on the proportional font. However, if I'd been forging these documents, I certainly would have used Courier font or one like it so it looked typed. It makes me wonder if the person who created these is young, too young to have had much experience with typewriters.

Newsrooms Under Siege! Film At Eleven

Instapundit points to the following editorial in the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Newsrooms under siege
Edward Wasserman is Knight professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University

News is a messy and elusive form of information. Journalism is crude, tentative and fumbling, always involving compromise, and there's a healthy measure of give-and-take in the process.

But anybody who enters the profession makes a core commitment to do his or her best to determine and tell the truth. And that commitment is now under assault.
This commitment is beyond question in Mr. Wasserman’s eyes. To ask why an AP story describes booing when none took place is to assault the truth-teller when we should just accept that he is telling the truth.

The attack doesn't come from ideologically committed journalists and commentators who put together reports clearly selected and spun-dry to sell a political line. (Of course the attack doesn't come from partisan journalists; they are what is being attacked by those concerned with media bias.) As long as such writers retain some minimal respect for fact (and who keeps this from happening?), the transparency of their motives may even work to enrich the variety of information and interpretations available to all.
See, bias in the media is good. The concept of a “variety of information” would be more convincing if there were a variety of view points in the news room. Unfortunately, statistics show that the mainstream media is over-whelmingly liberal, so, instead of one biased story serving as a correction on another biased story, there is a uniform bias that is significantly more liberal than the general population. Timothy Groseclose of UCLA and Jeff Milyo of the University of Chicago performed a study which compared stories by journalists to speeches by members of Congress and found that journalists overwhelmingly cite the same sources of information (think tanks and the like) as Democrats in Congress; in other words, journalists are liberal partisans in their reporting.

Although we expected to find that most media lean left, we were astounded by the degree. A norm among journalists is to present “both sides of the issue.” Consequently, while we expected members of Congress to cite primarily think tanks that are on the same side of the ideological spectrum as they are, we expected journalists to practice a much more balanced citation practice, even if the journalist’s own ideology opposed the think tanks that he or she is sometimes citing. This was not always the case. Most of the mainstream media outlets that we examined (ie all those besides Drudge Report and Fox News’ Special Report) were closer to the average Democrat in Congress than they were to the median member of the House. pdf download

John Tierney, columnist for the New York Times, did an informal servey during the Democratic convention. Asking “Who would make the better president?”, he got the following results:

We got anonymous answers from 153 journalists, about a third of them based in Washington. When asked who would be a better president, the journalists from outside the Beltway picked Mr. Kerry 3 to 1, and the ones from Washington favored him 12 to 1. Those results jibe with previous surveys over the past two decades showing that journalists tend to be Democrats, especially the ones based in Washington. Some surveys have found that more than 80 percent of the Beltway press corps votes Democratic.

(Sorry I didn't go for the original, but I didn't want to pay the $2.95.) This doesn't bode well for Mr. Wasserman's "variety of information"; seems more like conformity to me.
The more compelling danger concerns news organizations in the so-called mainstream. These are the country's best-staffed and most influential news organizations, and they're losing their nerve.

I understand why. It's hard now even to write for publication without being aware of just how thoroughly what you say is going to be inspected for any trace of undesirable political tilt and denounced by a free-floating cadre of rightist warriors.
Because, as we all know, only rightist warriors complain about news coverage. Or is it that only complaints from right of center are automatically assumed to be without foundation? And do you notice how journalists and commentators are "committed idealogues", not a free-floating cadre of leftist warriors? Nope, no bias here, move along now.
If that's apparent to me as a mere columnist, I can only imagine the current mind-set of supervising editors: If we give prominence to this story of carnage in Iraq, will we be accused of anti-administration bias? And - here it gets interesting - will we therefore owe our readers an offsetting story, perhaps an inspirational tale of Marines teaching young Iraqis how to play softball?
Notice how he contrasts the two positions. The responsible media wants to tell you about carnage. Those right-wingers want to tell you about a softball game. What about a story about Marines successfully fighting insurgents or about Iraqis voting in local elections or the large variety of newspapers that are now available in Baghdad. You know, something that places the carnage in context: who’s winning the battles and what are we fighting for. But the committed truth-tellers in the MSM decided long ago that it’s a quagmire, so that’s what the story we’re getting.
Now, both stories may well be integral to the news. If so, both should be told. The problem arises when the pressure to tell the softball story comes not from a principled desire to deliver a factual account that is broadly emblematic of significant happenings in Iraq, but from a gutless attempt to buy off a hostile and suspicious fragment of the audience base.
Of course, only the news media has the expertise to decide which is which.
News then becomes a negotiation - not a negotiation among discordant pictures of reality, as it always is, but an abject negotiation with a loud and bullying sliver of the audience. News of great significance becomes not an honest attempt to reflect genuinely contradictory realities, but a daily bargaining session with an increasingly factionalized public, a corrupted process in which elements of the news become offerings - payments really - in a kind of intellectual extortion.

The performance of this country's finest news organizations in the run-up to the Iraq invasion of March 2003 will be remembered as a disgrace. To be sure, it was an angry, fearful time, when independent-minded reporting might not have been heard above the drumbeats of patriotism and war. But it's hard to read the hand-wringing confessionals from news organizations that now realize that they got the prewar story wrong without concluding that the real problem was they were afraid to tell the truth.
Some detail here might be nice. I do remember stories screaming quagmire and promising endless street to street fighting in Baghdad. If Mr. Wasserman is referring to the failure so far to find large stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, I’m surprised to learn that the media knew ahead of time that the stockpiles weren’t there, when intelligence services in the US, UK, France, Russia, and others were so sure they were.
Resisting undue outside influence is part of what news professionals do. But it's hard enough to get the story right, without holding it hostage to an open-ended negotiation with zealots who believe they already know what the story is.
The problem here is that the barbarians may be inside the gates. Read Powerline’s continuing saga of the boos that weren’t (Here and here. Someone at AP seems to have decided what the story should be and wrote that thousands booed President Bush’s announcement of former President Clinton’s illness, when there were, in fact, no boos, something AP later admitted. Of course, by that time, the lie was half way ‘round the globe and truth didn’t stand a chance. I’d still like an explanation from AP as to how this happened; so would the guys at Powerline. Sowould a lot of the people who were at the rally. But according to Mr. Wasserman, telling the truth is a hard job that should be left to the professionals.
Of course, what Mr. Wasserman is attempting to do what Al Gore wanted to do with his “digital brownshirts” speech and that is to mark any criticism of the news media out of bounds, to shame any journalist who might be re-considering the group-think of his profession. Journalists assert their right to question and probe any other profession, but they should be above scrutiny, because they're committed truth-tellers. Just shut up and watch the news.

There Were No Boos

At a rally in Wisconsin, President Bush announced that former President Clinton was ill and asked the crowd to remember him in their prayers. The crowd gasped at the announcement and applauded for the former President's recovery.

No real story there--so the AP apparently decided to invent one. Their story reads

WEST ALLIS, Wis. - President Bush (news - web sites) on Friday wished Bill Clinton (news - web sites) "best wishes for a swift and speedy recovery." "He's is in our thoughts and prayers," Bush said at a campaign rally. Bush's audience of thousands in West Allis, Wis., booed. Bush did nothing to stop them. Bush offered his wishes while campaigning one day after accepting the presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention in New York.

His audience of thousands booed and he did nothing to stop them.

It didn't happen. Go here to read the account of LisaS, a young woman who was there with her father (Correction: she attended with her mother.) . She has a link to the audio of President Bush's statement. It's very clear and there aren't any boos that I can hear. Is it possible that 1 or 2 booed out of range of the recording device? Sure, but that hardly qualifies for a sentence that reads audience of thousands booed. She also has a screen shot of the original story, because AP has changed it with no explanation or retraction.

Earlier this year, Evan Thomas of Newsweek stated that the media wanted Kerry to win and it was worth 15 points in the polls. That's just wrong. Elections should be determined by voters, not by the media elite.

This story is being taken up by Instapundit and Powerline.

Thanks to LisaS for putting this information out there. AP should issue a retraction and an apology, but I'm not holding my breath.

Update Check out LisaS' other entry on the rally. She has some great pictures and has taken to ordering the President around--good story.

Update2 Swimming Through The Spin has some very good information, also, especially his Update #7. The reporter who wrote the story is Scott Lindlaw and has done this kind of thing before. Some of Swimming's links go back to Instapundit, who has taken note of Lindlaw's bias in the past. Also, LittleBirdie has posted the contact information for AP. Thanks, LittleBirdie.