g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue
Ravishing Light
Rosenblog
Cartago Delenda Est

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Wednesday, March 9, 2005
15:29 - Shooting the messenger

(top) link
Either incompetent or lying. This kind of vocabulary sucks to have to use; but it's the only one that works.

I don't see any other way to attempt to explain the people who are trying to minimize or change the terms of discussion regarding the Rathergate memos. Like Tim Goodman of the estimable SF Chronicle, via Tim Blair:

The fetid amusement of killing Dan Rather ends tonight. And what a tired affair it was.

There’s no pride in watching the deconstruction of a man. You can take all your conservative pundits who rode down the warpaths of perceived biased and mute them forever now. You can take your navel-gazing journalists who believe Rather made A Big Mistake He Must Pay For and put them in a room, where their own self importance will choke them all to death. And you can take your CBS backstabbers who found in Rather’s last hours of weakness a chance to rise up and join the chorus of haters—becoming smaller themselves as the time of his career suicide drew near—and give them all a great big prize for bravery.

And yes, that includes Walter Cronkite.

Take them all away. Anybody who found joy in this deserves to rot in their own mean-spiritedness. Bravo, you threw stones at a 74-year-old careerist. You whispered sad stories about a weird man to a press corps all too willing to take him out. Dan Rather, who was by most accounts ambitious, polarizing, determined, a self-promoter, a tireless worker, a man who believed in his own ideals, a square peg in the proverbial round hole, the replacement for a myth, a flawed arbiter of history, a man less smooth than his peers and, lastly, a man complicit in a story that may have been inaccurate but not entirely wrong, is no longer the Dan Rather we knew …

And now his time is over—not merely part of an era ended, as when Brokaw retired, but a tortured anti-hero paying the price for indiscretions few can even remember.

It's times like this that all you can do is stare quizzically at the person spewing words like these, squint a little, see if they're joking... and if it's clear that they're not, flail your arms as wildly as you can and yell, at the top of your lungs, THEY WERE FREAKING FAKE!



Auto-centered address at the top. Times New Roman. Crumpled and smoothed out to look old. Etc, etc, etc.

This is what Dan Rather presented, uncritically and with great fanfare, to a credulous public that trusted him. That's a failure of basic journalism that would disgrace a freshman stringer. And yet Rather, senior anchorman, spiritual heir to the legacy of Cronkite and Murrow, whether because of intent to deceive or inability to detect obvious fraud went ahead and presented it anyway. And we're supposed to feel sorry for him? We're supposed to give him a break?

See LGF for all the rest of the damning analysis including lots of visual aids every bit as good as the one above. Incorrect abbreviations, date discrepancies, unauthentic military usage and style, badly forged signatures, testimonials from the people who knew Killian (including the secretary who would have typed the memos if they'd been real), and on and on.

But really, none of it should be necessary at all; because the docs are bloody WORD PRINTOUTS. They just are. Who seriously cannot tell that? Anyone who has used a computer at all in the last ten years knows a Word document when he or she sees it—there are just certain subtle but obvious elements to the way Word creates default documents, including the font, the margins, the tab stops, the word wrap, and the autocorrected features like the infamous superscript "th" that people are still trying to tell the public was a common feature on 1972-era desk typewriters in general use in Texas Air National Guard offices and used by colonels who hated typing.

You don't need to know the arcane details of typography to see these things for what they are. All you have to do is use Word on occasion. And considering that these are all reporters advancing these defensive stories, how likely is it that none of them have ever used Word? Of those who have, how many have even seen the memos in question and done any thinking on their own about what they rather seem to look like—let alone looked at the LGF/Power Line/INDC Journal images to see the evidence of their own eyes? Any of them?

Either they're ignoring material evidence or they're unable to interpret it in a professional manner. Does that make them incompetent, or outright liars? It's got to be one of the two.

They're trying to shift the discussion onto being some kind of "witch-hunt" where sinister conservative bloggers are given "marching orders" (I love how often that term comes up) by some "Buckhead" guy at The Free Republic (Karl Rove in disguise, perhaps?) to go forth and whip up a media frenzy over pointless little inanities of fonts and kerning and such, gnawing on it tenaciously until we have the precious, precious blood of our lifelong foe Dan Rather.

To me, though, and to LGF's readers and most of the sane sector of the blogosphere, it looks instead like there's a big ugly FACT sitting right here on our front lawn like the biggest dog turd you've ever seen, and Dan Rather's standing there smirking with his huge slobbery Great Dane at his side, and he's pointing innocently at himself and going, "What? Me? You think I did something wrong here?"

Seriously, it does not get much more cut-and-dried than this here. And yet it's apparently a sign of the times that even that isn't enough to generate a case any more conclusive than the O.J. trial. Now we have Rather retiring among accolades and retrospectives and sniffly defense editorials, rather than with the disgraced discretion anyone of his credentials should have the decency to assume after being so closely associated with such a scandal. Either Rather is incompetent or lying—or he's totally surrounded by assistants and deputies who are incompetent or lying, which is hardly any better.

That's what I don't get about this, and why I feel compelled to weigh in for what I hope is one last time (it's okay, Tim Goodman): this should be an open-and-shut case, where not just the evidence itself but plain common sense tells us a more unequivocal story than just about any since Watergate or Monicagate. And yet not only is there no real contrition among the affected parties for what happened, there's not even any consensus. It's like we've got a team of philosopher-poets all crouching around that big steaming pile on the lawn, all rubbing their chins and trying to come up with as many possible explanations as they can, some plausible and some not, for what else but what it looks like it might possibly be.

I'd love to put it behind us. It's a disgrace to all of us for it to have happened in our news media at all. But we can't do so if the way this incident goes into the history books is as a mean-spirited, blown-out-of-proportion smear job by a bunch of paid partisan hacks against an honorable and honest newsman at the end of his career. That's a grave insult to the very concepts of civil rational discourse, honest and well-researched news reporting, and careful scientific analysis, the very things we're supposed to be trying to have more of in this country. ...Right?

UPDATE: And now that Dan's history, it's on to more fertile territory, in which a new and potentially embarrassing account of Saddam's capture is debunked in detail by the technically savvy and first-handedly familiar before the news media even have time to put together their front-page treatments of it. SomethingAwful is mentioned.

UPDATE: Oh yes—and as Steve W. mentions, couldn't Rather have saved himself hundreds of thousands of dollars by simply firing up Word on his own computer (assuming he has such a device) and trying to reproduce the Killian documents on his own? If he has any conversance whatsoever with the basic modern tools of journalism, that little experiment ought to tell him all he ever needed to know.


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