SwiftVets.com

[fortdixlover]

MSM "Basic Standards" are the "standards of privilege" of media talking heads like Dan Blather.

Has anyone noted the similarity in behavior between the MSM talking heads and tenured professors? The corruption of privilege infects both.

-- FDL


CBS falls for Kerry campaign's fake memo

September 12, 2004

BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

http://www.suntimes.com/output/steyn/cst-edt-steyn12.html


A few weeks ago, Thomas Oliphant of the Boston Globe was on PBS' ''Newshour'' explaining why the hundreds of swift boat veterans' allegations against John Kerry's conduct in Vietnam was unworthy of his attention. "The standard of clear and convincing evidence," he said, talking to Swiftvet John O'Neill as if he were a backward fourth-grader, ''is what keeps this story in the tabloids -- because it does not meet basic standards.''

Last week, we got a good idea of what Thomas Oliphant's ''basic standards'' are. Dan Rather and the elderly gentlemen at ''60 Minutes'' were all atwitter because they'd come into possession of some hitherto undiscovered memos relating to whether George W. Bush failed to show up for his physical in the War of 1812. The media had been flogging this dead horse all spring, but these newly ''discovered'' memos had jump-started the old nag just enough to get him on his knees long enough for the media to flog him all over again.

Unfortunately for CBS, Dan Rather's hairdresser sucks up so much of the budget that there was nothing left for any fact-checking, so the ''60 Minutes'' crew rushed on air with a damning National Guard memo conveniently called ''CYA'' that Bush's commanding officer had written to himself 32 years ago. ''This was too hot not to push,'' one producer told the American Spectator. Hundreds of living Swiftvets who've signed affidavits and are prepared to testify on camera -- that's way too cold to push; we'd want to fact-check that one thoroughly, till, say, midway through John Kerry's second term. But a handful of memos by one dead guy slipped to us by a Kerry campaign operative -- that meets ''basic standards'' and we gotta get it out there right away.

The only problem was the memo. Amazingly, this guy at the Air National Guard base, Lt. Col. Killian, had the only typewriter in Texas in 1973 using a prototype version of the default letter writing program of Microsoft Word, complete with the tiny little superscript thingy that automatically changes July 4th to July 4th. To do that on most 1973 typewriters, you had to unscrew the keys, grab a hammer and give them a couple of thwacks to make the ''t'' and ''h'' squish up all tiny, and even think it looked a bit wonky. You'd think having such a unique typewriter Killian would have used a less easily traceable model for his devastating ''CYA'' memo. Also, he might have chosen a font other than Times New Roman, designed for the Times of London in the 1930s and not licensed to Microsoft by Rupert Murdoch (the Times' owner) until the 1980s.

Killian is no longer around to confirm his extraordinary Magic Typewriter, but his son denied the stuff was written by his dad, and his widow said her late husband never typed. So, on the one hand, we have hundreds of living veterans with chapter and verse on Kerry's fantasy Christmas in Cambodia, and, on the other hand, we have a guy who's been dead 20 years but is still capable of operating Windows XP. It took the savvy chappies at the Powerline Web site and Charles Johnson of ''Little Green Footballs'' about 20 minutes to spot the eerily 2004 look of the 1972 memo, and various Internet wallahs spent the rest of the day tracking down the country's leading typewriter identification experts.

Bombarded with accusations that CBS had fallen for an obvious hoax, Dan turned to his trusty Smith-Corona and bashed out a few e-mails: ''For the umpteenth time,'' he said angrily, ''this is the kind of sleaze I had to put up with when they scoffed at 'What's the frequency, Kenneth?' "

Are Dan Rather and ''60 Minutes'' a bunch of patsies suckered by the Kerry campaign? Not exactly. According to the American Spectator, ''The CBS producer said that some alarm bells went off last week when the signatures and initials of Killian on the documents in hand did not match up with other documents available on the public record, but producers chose to move ahead with the story.''

Hey, why not? Who's gonna spot it? If CBS says it's so, that's good enough for Thomas Oliphant's Boston Globe, the New York Times and the Washington Post, all of whom rushed the story onto their front pages because it met their ''basic standards.'' On Friday morning, Paul Krugman, the New York Times' excitable economist, filed a column called, ''The Dishonesty Thing,'' and for one moment I thought he was about to upbraid CBS for rushing on air with their laughably fake memos. But no, he was droning on about how the National Guard story demonstrated George W. Bush's ''pattern of lies: his assertions that he fulfilled his obligations when he obviously didn't ..."

The tragedy for Rather, Oliphant, Krugman and Co. is that even if the memos were authentic nobody would care. Their boy Kerry had a crummy August not because he didn't hammer Bush for being AWOL in the Spanish-American War but because the senator's AWOL in the present war. Big Media are trashing their own reputations in service to a man who can never win.

After the 2002 election, I wrote, ''Remind me never to complain about 'liberal media bias' again. Right now, liberal media bias is conspiring to assist the Democrats to sleepwalk over the cliff.''

The media and the Democrats sustain each other's make-believe land. Dan Rather tells his staff, ''Kerry's told me there's nothing to this Swiftvet thing.'' Kerry tells his, ''Rather's assured me this Swiftvet story's going nowhere.''

George W. Bush ought to wake up every morning and thank the Lord the media aren't on his side.

Remember the Hitler Diaries? They turned up in the '80s. Only problem is they weren't by Hitler. But by then various prestige publications had paid a fortune to serialize them. Among them was the Sunday Times of London, owned by Murdoch, who wasn't happy. He called the editor, Frank Giles, into his office, and said, ''Frank, I'm promoting you to editor emeritus.''

''I've always wondered,'' murmured Frank, ''what 'editor emeritus' means.''

''The 'e-' means you've been given the elbow and the '-meritus' means you bloody deserve it,'' said Murdoch.

I have a feeling after November CBS News will be promoting Dan Rather to editor emeritus.

Either that, or next week's ''60 Minutes'' -- ''Exclusive! Handwriting Expert Says Bush Wrote The Hitler Diaries!'' -- will have much better fact-checking.

[NortonPete]

Nice hammer fortdix.
CBS and Rather are about 6 feet under

[BrianC]

"Basic Standards" = "DNC/Kerry Campaign Talking Points".

[USAF66-70]

[fortdixlover]

[Chuck54]

Every time I hear the MSM talk about jounalistic standards I just laugh my head off. They have no standards except the standard to push lefty causes. That is their standard....and they hold that standard pretty darn well I must say.

CBS is now a laughingstock. Only their fellow lefties take them at all seriously any more. All their pompous airs now just make them look even more ridiculous.....like a mentally disturbed person walking down main street wearing a crown and robe, and carrying a sceptor.

I used to just disagree with them....now their are a pathetic joke. Time to close up shop boys, and let real journalists handle the news and investigations. Journalists who put truth and integrity above all else, espeically their politics.
_________________
"And no pair has been more wrong, more loudly, more often, than the two Senators from Massachusetts, Ted Kennedy and John Kerry"

Zell Miller

[Dimsdale]

The effeminate Oliphant is the archetypal "bowtied bumkisser" of the Boston Globe, who frequently recounts how he was next to Kerry when he threw "his" medals over the fence at Congress. He is an unapologetic Kerry supporter and SBVT basher. I believe he was in a bit of a ethical scrape a few years back, but I cannot recall the details.

Mike Barnicle, fired from the Globe because he got caught fabricationg stories (fired for getting caught, not fabricating) was on Imus ripping the Swiftees and humping Kerry. I wrote a letter to him and got the lamest and factually deficient response you could imagine. Now I send him letters just to taunt him. The gutless weasel doesn't write anymore.

Their claims of "journalistic standards" and "the standard of clear and convincing evidence" are about as true as Kerry's claims of spending Christmas in Cambodia. If the likes of Joseph Wilson and John Kerry meet those "standards," then their standards are pretty low, for Democrats only, and highly hypocritical.
_________________
Everytime he had a choice, Kerry chose to side with communists rather than the United States.

[Sandra C.]

In 1986, I worked on one of those Selectra typewriters, before the COMPUTER AGE. They were expensive, about $3,400 for a USED one, had a memory of about 6,000 characters, and put out beautiful clean copy to be used for paste-ups (a thing of long ago.....). $3,400 in 1986 dollars, a lot of money in those days.

Am here to tell you it was terribly difficult to change font size 11 or 12 to size 8 in order to get the "raised" superscript without the spacing getting totally messed up because of the adjustments in the change in the size. It was considered not even worthy of the attempt at my place of slave labor (I mean employment), and thus I always just did the 111th, or 1st just as you see them and my boss just told the customer that "that's really considered the PRO-per way to do it" -- and the client would go oh, ok.

(My second graphics/pre-press job in a full-color print shop on huge-memory computers was LOTS more fun!)