BY DAN
KENNEDY
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Friday, September 10, 2004
RATHER FLAT. Dan Rather gets
a B-minus for his defense
of the Killian documents tonight. Parts of his report were fairly
compelling. Since the superscripted "th" has become such an issue, it
was pretty interesting to see that some of Bush's official National
Guard records, released by the White House, have the same
typographical feature.
Rather also reported that Times New
Roman, the typeface used in the documents, has been available since
1931. In fact, we
already knew that some of
the earliest claims made by the conservative bloggers who kicked this
story off yesterday were just plain wrong. (Liberal bloggers can play
this game, too.) Examples: that Times New Roman wasn't available in
1972 (oh, yes it was), and that there was no such thing as a
typewriter that did proportional spacing (ditto).
But I agree with Josh
Marshall: it still seems
more likely that someone simply banged this out in Microsoft Word
than it does that Killian had exactly the right typewriter,
with exactly the right font (granted, it's the most common
font), and happened to format it exactly the way a Word
document would be formatted by default.
My first criticism of Rather was
that he didn't go deep enough really to convince me or anyone else
that the documents weren't fakes. Yes, the evening newscast is over
in the blink of an eye, but the hurricane coverage lasted longer than
a real hurricane. My second complaint is that he dwelled too much on
other aspects of the story, and tried to argue that a few li'l ol'
documents don't really undermine what we know about Bush and the
National Guard.
Well, they don't in a perfect
world, but this is all about atmospherics. The truth is that the
narrative of the campaign has changed overnight, and Rather said
nothing to change that. Bush supporters will now boldly reject every
single contention about Bush's National Guard service (or
non-service), and huge segments of the media will be too cowed to
point out the reality.
Plus, there remains the central
question: where did these documents come from? Bushies are already
openly describing this as a dirty-tricks op by the Kerry campaign,
even though the only "evidence" we've seen is that anonymously
sourced report from the
American Spectator, home of the Arkansas Project.
But that's obviously where this is
heading. Rather than asking legitimate questions about Bush's Guard
service (or, gee, I don't know, about the war in Iraq, or health
care; just a thought), the next media obsession will be: what did Bob
Shrum know, and when did he know it?
I'll also be very interested to see
tomorrow's Washington Post. Today the paper all but pronounced
the documents to be forgeries.
Will it back down?
posted at 8:10 PM |
2 comments
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2 Comments:
the hurricane coverage lasted longer than a real hurricane.
You dumb cunt!
I haven't read enough on this topic, I think (nor am I likely to), to know what you mean by the format of the document being exactly that of a default Word document. However, the military has long been renowned for having an approved way to do everything, so the question may reduce to whether the format of this document differs in any way from the dictates of the style manual in use at the time. It is certainly possible that Microsoft may have based Word's default document format on a government-approved style manual (to enhance adoption by governmental agencies, for instance).
Your larger point about the image being more important than the reality is well taken, though. As long as the facts continue take a back seat, the tail will continue to wag the dog.
--Th. Donaghey
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Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
