CBS "sexed up" Bush Air Guard claims

The phrase "sexed up" was made famous after BBC was found guilty of maliciously lying about evidence PM Blair used before the Iraq war. Will CBS share the same fate as the now defamed BBC? It appears the network used phony documents to make its case that president Bush’s discharge from the Air Guard was not in fact honorable. Powerline has been all over this story:

Every single one of the memos to file regarding Bush's failure to attend a physical and meet other requirements is in a proportionally spaced font, probably Palatino or Times New Roman. In 1972 people used typewriters for this sort of thing (especially in the military), and typewriters used mono-spaced fonts.

The use of proportionally spaced fonts did not come into common use for office memos until the introduction high-end word processing systems from Xerox and Wang, and later of laser printers, word processing software, and personal computers. They were not widespread until the mid to late 90's.

Before then, you needed typesetting equipment, and that wasn't used for personal memos to file. Even the Wang and other systems that were dominant in the mid 80's used mono-spaced fonts. I doubt the TANG had typesetting.

The case is made more clearly when you view an actual copy of the CBS document and a Microsoft Word document with the same message typed on it. This comes from Daily Recycler:

When comparing the spacing, the font, and the appearance of superscript (ie: the raised “th” after 111 on paragraph 2 of the report) it becomes clear that this was created using Microsoft Word and was then run through 15 generations of photocopying to make the document appear older than it actually is.

At this point CBS is denying the charges and stands by the documents saying that their “independent experts” have examined the documents and claim they are legitimate. The longer CBS takes to denounce this obvious hoax, the greater a scandal this will be for the network when the nation sees just how far CBS will go to smear our president.

UPDATE: I wonder if the annoying little help character in MS Word was bothering Dan Rather when he typed up these bogus documents on his computer. Found this over at one of my favorite websites:

UPDATE #2: Piling on! Looks like the CBS phony documents story is moving its way up the media food-chain: The Weekly Standard, CNS News, NewsMax, AP, World Net Daily, National Review, and The Drudge Report.

At this rate it should be headline news by tomorrow night.

UPDATE #3: Wow, the Washington Post has picked up the forgery story and ran with it - nailing CBS to the wall. ABC News is also covering the story, and has experts of its own who say the documents are most likely fake. It looks as though CBS will be canibalized by its own peers in the main-stream (liberal) press. Heads will roll for this - someone should follow Dan Rather around holding a basket!

UPDATE #4: Drudge is reporting that CBS executives have initiated an internal investigation into the Dan Rather/60 Minutes "document-gate" fiasco:

CBS NEWS executives have launched an internal investigation into whether its premiere news program 60 MINUTES aired fabricated documents relating to Bush's National Guard service, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned."The reputation and integrity of the entire news division is at stake, if we are in error, it will be corrected," a top CBS source explained late Thursday.The source, who asked not to be named, described CBSNEWS anchor and 60 MINUTES correspondent Dan Rather as being privately "shell-shocked" by the increasingly likelihood that the documents in question were fraudulent.

Rather must be reeling. How do you like the heat, DAN? This is truely a proud day for bloggers. John Hinderaker over at PowerLine should get a freakin medal for uncovering this!