II. Rathergate
We arrive at Rathergate in 2004. I’m guessing you all know the story from my end. On September 8 CBS News broadcast the story “For The Record” seeking to impugn President Bush’s National Guard service based on memos allegedly from the personal file of President Bush’s commanding officer. Thinking there might be more to the story, I wrote about the segment the following morning in a post I titled “The Sixty-First Minute.” I concluded with comment number 47 — by Atlanta attorney Harry MacDougald, as it turned out, writing under the pseudonym Buckhead — from the Free Republic thread on the 60 Minutes story that a reader had sent to us overnight:
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 Palatine 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 or high-end 1st generation word processing systems.
I am saying these documents are forgeries, run through a copier for 15 generations to make them look old. This should be pursued aggressively.
I published my post at 7:51 a.m. and went to work. By the time I got to work we had received numerous email messages pointing out anomalies in the documents — with the format, with the typeface, with the spacing, and with the content. I started posting updates to “The Sixty-First Minute.”
I called John Hinderaker mid-morning and asked for help. John called me back some 15 minutes later. Having scrolled through the ever-increasing number of emails by that point, John commented: “CBS News is toast. The key to the case is kerning.”
As is ususally the case, John was right — that was one key to the case. There were others, but that was a good one.
Early that afternoon Drudge linked to my “Sixty-First Minute” post with an upside down siren. The traffic put us out of commission for a few hours. By the end of the day our software recorded that 250,000 readers had checked out the post.
Dan Rather dragged the story out by sticking with it for 12 days before admitting he’d been unable to authenticate the documents, as he put it. As we had reported, they were obvious fabrications. They demonstrated that CBS News had sought to affect the outcome of a presidential election with a fraudulent story. It was a big deal.
Rather’s apology — his phony apology, as his subsequent memoir makes clear — wasn’t the last word. CBS News announced that it was commissioning an investigation into what had gone wrong. In January 2005 CBS News released the Report of the Independent Review Panel (the Thornburgh-Boccardi report) and fired the producer of the story, Mary Mapes, along with three executives. Later that year they fired Dan Rather and Andrew Heyward, the president of CBS News. The Thornburgh-Boccardi report proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that the documents were fabrications.
And yet Rather and Mapes soldiered on. Mapes published Truth and Duty in late 2005. Rather published Rather Outspoken (with Digby Diehl) in 2012. The movie Truth, based on Mapes’s memoir, was released in 2015. They stand by the story. Indeed, the movie makes Rather and Mapes the heroes of the story.
I’ve talked to many groups around the country about my experience with the “Sixty First Minute” over the years. I think it’s only a slight exaggeration to say that nobody knows what happened anymore. Everyone has a vague recollection, but few are sure what happened or what it was all about.
I used to joke with John that when they made a movie of our contribution to the exposure of the 60 Minutes story, Robert Redford could play John and Dustin Hoffman could play me. But no! When they made the movie, Robert Redford played Dan Rather and Cate Blanchett played Mary Mapes.
Andrew Heyward hasn’t spoken much about the scandal for public consumption, but he was provoked by the film Truth to comment in 2015. Heyward told the Times that the film “takes people responsible for the worst embarrassment in the history of CBS News, and what was at the time a grievous blow to the credibility of a proud news organization, and turns them into martyrs and heroes. Only Hollywood could come up with that.” One might say that truer words were never spoken.
Illumination 2 — The left never gives up. As bad as the Star Tribune is, the big outlets of the mainstream press that the Star Tribune seeks to emulate are worse. But the American people have more or less caught on.
