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September 10, 2004
New York Times does damage control By Tom Smith Here's the NYT on fontgate or whatever we're going to call it. Now we know what the MSM damage control line is going to be: "Experts disagree! Oh darn! I guess we'll never know! What a shame!" Oddly, the experts who think the CBS docs are transparently crude forgeries have names, while the other experts are well, just experts. Now shut up. At least the Times, ever so briefly, notes the role of weblogs. This story was just designed to drive any Republican who knows a little bit about computers, printers, fonts, etc. etc. Absolutely crazy. But I shall try to have faith. I just don't think they can hold out more than a few more days against the accumulating evidence that the docs are forgeries. The fact that they're already at the fallback position of "we'll never know" is telling. Particularly disgusting on this has been CNN. I just watched Aaron Brown, or whatever his name is, you know, the nauseatingly sensitive anchor guy, ask follow up questions along the lines of "Now, without the original documents, is it really possible to know for sure who is right?" "Oh, no, Aaron, we'll never know . . ." When of course, the right question is, is there any reason to believe they are authentic? Do they appear to be genuine or not? On which side is the weight of the evidence? If some one tells you something is a moon rock and it looks like pool tile, you infer he's full of it, even if all you have to go on is the appearance of the thing. The standard is not, can we be absolutely certain they are forgeries. Not only do they fake up documents, which by the way is probably criminal in addition to being dirty, they insult our intelligence at the same time. Now all we need is a Roger Rosenblatt "essay" on ambiguities, all the things we'll never know, getting lost in minutiae and missing the big picture . . . It's coming. You just wait. AND there's this on Hugh Hewitt's site: Hi Hugh, I am a Professor of Computer Science at Rice University who has followed the evolution of word processing technology over the past 30 years. A cursory glance at the "Killian documents" shows that they are forgeries, the product of a modern word processing system. Even the most powerful word processing systems available in the early 70's were not designed to produce propotionally spaced documents. . . . "A cursory glance" is all that it takes. It goes on from there. And guess what? The professor is right, and the dunderheads at CBS are wrong. |