From the WSJ Opinion Archives
TASTE COMMENTARY
The Camera Blinks
A nation of fact-checkers, a network in denial.
Over the years, Dan Rather has been fond of saying, "You trust your mother, but you cut the cards."
It's not a widely used phrase. In fact, a search of the Nexis database reveals that nearly every public utterance of it has come from Mr. Rather, who uses it to illustrate his accuracy-above-all-else newsman's creed. "It's just a journalist's way of saying, you check it out," he explained to NBC's Tim Russert in 1999.
These days, the CBS News anchorman is being accused of violating his own rules--of failing to cut the cards--by relying on apparently forged documents in the "60 Minutes" broadcast attacking President Bush's record in the Texas Air National Guard. But that's not really a completely fair accusation. Instead, it appears that Mr. Rather did indeed check and re-check the authenticity of the papers. The problem is that, when each check and re-check cast doubt, he decided to go ahead anyway. And when he was caught out, mostly by a legion of bloggers who seemed to know more about the subject than he did, Mr. Rather responded like a politician caught in a scandal, attributing partisan motives to his critics while ignoring most of the charges against him.
For days leading up to the "60 Minutes" broadcast, CBS teased the public with word that Ben Barnes, the former speaker of the Texas House, would tell Mr. Rather on camera that he, Mr. Barnes, had pulled strings to get young George W. Bush a place in the Air National Guard. Then, shortly before the program aired, there were rumors the story might contain much more than that.
"The big news won't be how Bush got into the Guard but how he blew off his duties once he got there," the liberal blogger Joshua Micah Marshall, citing "several sources," wrote the day before the broadcast. "New documents--stuff that is clear and straightforward and apparently puts beyond any debate or doubt that the now-President blew off his duties that he said, as recently as this year, that he fulfilled."
And indeed, there were new documents that appeared, on first glance, to be explosive. In one, dated Aug. 18, 1973, Mr. Bush's superior officer, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, writing a "Memo to File," complained that higher-ups were pressuring him to "sugar coat" Mr. Bush's record after he had left the Guard base to go to Alabama. In another "Memo to File," dated May 19, 1972, Lt. Killian wrote that Mr. Bush was "talking to someone upstairs" in an effort to avoid his obligations.
No wonder Mr. Rather thought he had one hell of a scoop. But within minutes of the broadcast, the story began to crumble. To its credit, CBS News posted the documents on its Web site, allowing any and all to take a look. By midnight, the first question appeared, from a reader of the conservative FreeRepublic.com who went by the nom de net "Buckhead." He questioned the type font used in the memos, saying it appeared to be the product of a modern word-processing program, not a 1972 typewriter. "I am saying these documents are forgeries, run through a copier for 15 generations to make them look old," Buckhead wrote. "This should be pursued aggressively."
And it was. By last Friday, two days after the broadcast, the questions were coming from all directions--often from previously little-known Web sites like powerlineblog.com, littlegreenfootballs.com and indcjournal.com. Checking reference guides and consulting experts, the bloggers were doing the kind of legwork on the documents' authenticity that should have been done by CBS.
First came questions about technical issues: font style, proportional spacing, superscripts, centering capacity and the like. The discussion became excruciatingly detailed, but a consensus emerged: It was highly, highly unlikely that such documents were produced 30 years ago in Jerry Killian's office at the Texas Air National Guard.
But the problems with the story involved much more than fonts. For example, Col. Killian's widow said she thought the memos were fake. "He would not have typed because he did not type," she said. (The colonel's secretary later said that she didn't type them either.) Then it was learned that the officer who supposedly pressured Killian to "sugar coat" Mr. Bush's record had in fact retired 18 months before the document was supposedly written. And then another officer, who CBS sources had claimed was the network's "trump card" in supporting the story, said the network had never shown him the documents, which he believed were phony.
All that was bad enough. But then came revelations about the procedures CBS used to authenticate the documents.
In its initial defense, the network cited Marcel B. Matley, a handwriting expert who Mr. Rather said had "analyzed the documents for CBS News" and who "believes \[they\] are real." A few days later, Mr. Matley admitted to the Washington Post that he had looked only at Lt. Killian's signature (which was on just two of the four documents) and could not vouch for any of the papers. "There's no way that I, as a document expert, can authenticate them," Mr. Matley told the Post. Meanwhile, CBS claimed that the doubters couldn't assess the documents properly because they had "photocopied, faxed, scanned, and downloaded" them, degrading their quality. Then Mr. Rather admitted that the documents in CBS's possession were photocopies too.
Still, CBS held its ground, saying it had consulted other authorities who did verify the documents' authenticity. But that statement was barely out of the network's mouth when ABC News reported that two other experts consulted by CBS said they could not do so. One said she told CBS there were serious problems with the papers, but the network ignored her. "I did not feel that they wanted to investigate it very deeply," she told ABC.
By Wednesday, CBS signaled it would make a statement. Some giddy netizens expected the network to cave, but after a day of delays and rumors, CBS rolled out an almost surreal "fake but true" defense, in which it seemed to concede the possibility that the documents were forgeries but insisted that they nevertheless conveyed the truth about Mr. Bush's Guard service.
Will that quiet the storm? Not likely. The moral of it all is that it is infinitely more difficult for journalists to make questionable assertions in the age of the blogosphere than it was in years past. There is an army of well-informed fact-checkers out there, all connected on the Internet. There are people who know about things like computer fonts, or IBM typewriters circa 1972, or the arcane terminology of the Air National Guard. Pick a completely different subject, and there will be people who know about that, too.
CBS was clearly angry that its judgment was questioned-- by nobodies! "You couldn't have a starker contrast between the multiple layers of checks and balances \[at the network\] and a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing," said one former CBS executive who defended Mr. Rather.
Well, it turned out that the guy in his pajamas was right, at least this time.
Mr. York is White House correspondent at National Review.
