2 posts tagged “dan rather”

I got to bed after 3 a.m. this morning and already I have told journalists:

• I confirm Sen. Clinton’s Bosnia story as I was hired as a sniper in Tuzla;
• I was the one who handed Dan Rather the Bush National Guard documents outside Kinko’s;
• I’ve still got that deleted part from the Watergate tapes; and
• Sen. John Kerry did indeed throw his medals away—I caught them.

   Can’t believe I said all that in a press release. Man, that sleep deprivation’s nasty.

I see Mr Dan Rather is suing CBS for $70 million. Wow, for that, he can buy a cranky judge a pair of pants. I originally read the article on AP, but here is a version from the folks at E! News:

In the lawsuit filed in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, Rather accuses CBS of violating his contract by purposely cutting into his allotted airtime on 60 Minutes and of committing fraud by conducting a biased inquiry into the incident that came to be known as “Rathergate,” seriously damaging his reputation in the process.

   I’ll see if I can track the statement of claim down if we get some time here, but the inquiry, from my recollection, was hardly biased.
   At the centre were the Rathergate documents (or Killian documents), which were critical of the service from a young George W. Bush in the US National Guard. They were the subject of one of my articles in Desktop many moons ago, and I was interviewed around that time about my analysis. There are a few records of that interview around the web, but here is a part that I located, which I repost as a reasonably definitive analysis of the documents’ typography:

   Dan Rather, of CBS, claims in his defense of the documents that the Times Roman typeface has been around since 1931. That is true, but the specific cut of the typeface used in the letters is post 1985. According to Mr. Yan, “Every time a font is recut for a different machine, experts are able to tell. Each laser printer, each digital file, has subtle differences.” But, Dan Rather being the professional journalist he is certainly must know more about typeface than all the leading font developers and computer script geeks in the world do.
   Mr. Yan went on to state, “Specifically, the typeface in the letters appears to be Times Roman, as licensed by Linotype of Germany, after 1985. It is not Times New Roman as Mr. Rather claims (as 'New Times Roman' [sic]), which is different again—that is very evident from the PDFs. (Hence in a lawsuit I worked on in 2001, the typeface was designed in 1954 but could only possibly have come off a Hewlett Packard LaserJet III post 1993). Despite reproduction, the proportions and sizes of the letters relative to each other remain the same and are identifiable to any true typographic expert.” Now, I bet you won't hear this full explanation on CBS’s 60 Minutes I, II, or any other number they want to throw out.
   Can CBS find a typewriter hiding somewhere in a barn outside New York City that might be able to produce this exact typeface that Mr. Rather claims was bestowed upon these typewritten documents? Quite possibly they could, but the only typewriter that could of come close to resembling a Times typeface was an IBM Selectric and those letters don’t have the Times cut Mr. Rather is defending. To further the point of the ease of telling forgery typed documents Mr. Yan stated, “Even to a layperson, the Selectric Golfball settings would seem looser (i.e. the type is not so close together).”
   Still Mr. Rather claims that other documents from the White House have superscript. “Superscript letters,” Mr. Yan shared, “on old typewriters were either (a) in the same size but raised or (b) were separate, selected letters in a cut that made them visually the same weight. The 60 Minutes documents have superscript letters that could only have been proportionally and mathematically reduced on a computer.”
   Finally according to Mr. Yan the defenders of these documents make “very fundamental errors, they can be argued against by any first-year design student studying typography. They also seem to be skewing the issue away from the typeface, which the one matter that effortlessly categorizes CBS documents as counterfeit.”

   My view is: Dan Rather was lucky that he lasted as long as he did for a story based on forged documents. He could have gone the same way as his producer, Mary Mapes, who was fired.
   What we cannot comment on, without seeing the contracts, is this additional contention in the claim:

According to Rather's complaint, he extended his tenure as anchor of the network news broadcast in 2002 with a contract guaranteeing him $6 million-per-year and top billing on the midweek 60 Minutes spin-off if he happened to leave his anchor position before March 2006.

   However, the suit does go on about his post-Rathergate experiences:

   Rather's contract entitled him to a regular correspondent's position on 60 Minutes.
   Rather had eight segments on the air in 2005, all of which, according to him, he had to fight tooth and nail for and he still ended up with half as many reports as his colleagues.
   “He was provided with very little staff support, very few of his suggested stories were approved, editing services were denied to him, and the broadcast of the few stories he was permitted to do was delayed and then played on carefully selected evenings, when low viewership was anticipated,” the lawsuit states.

   I remember some press reports at the time that we would see Rather on 60 Minutes even after he stepped down as the anchor of the flagship news programme.
   I imagine that CBS would have been careful about airing his segments because mud sticks, so as an outsider I can’t say that Rather’s claims are without merit.
   But to allege that he was made a patsy for the White House—given the network’s anti-war stance—is a bit hard to believe.
   What does surprise me is this in the E! report:

CBS … forced him to issue a public apology on Sept. 20, 2004—“despite his own personal feelings that no public apology from him was warranted.”

   Personally, I think the apology was warranted. His own reputation was saved in part because of it—but now we learn that he didn’t feel sorry for duping the American public with fake documents, Rather might have to take a hit.
   Apparently, he wasn’t responsible for the errors, according to his complaint. At the time, however, the inquiry panel found:

   He relied on a trusted producer and didn't check the story for accuracy or, apparently, even see it before he introduced it on the program, the panel said.
   CBS rushed the story on the air and then blindly defended it when holes became apparent, said the panel, which was unable to say conclusively whether memos disparaging Bush's service were real or fake.

   As the President’s opponents will tell us, there is plenty of stuff which one can use to criticize Dubya. Resorting to fakery was unnecessary, especially using something that could be so readily exposed.
   The conservative press is already fuming:

Dan Rather’s lawsuit against CBS should be dismissed, both in court and in public opinion, as a shameless and ridiculous effort to retract his on-air apologies for his smearing of President Bush with bogus National Guard documents in 2004. The New York Times reports Rather is suing CBS for what he claims is the network’s “‘biased’ and incomplete investigation of the flawed Guard broadcast.” That’s rich, since it was Rather’s reporting itself that was biased and incomplete.

   The timing of reviews of Mr Rather’s report on the Boeing Dreamliner or 787 cannot do the man much good now, either. On Wired yesterday:

By taking a cheap shot at Boeing, Dan Rather may be headed for a comeback less graceful than Britney Spears' performance at the MTV Music Awards.

Aaron Rowe at Wired, who is trained in researching materials’ engineering, investigated Rather’s 787 report. He calls those summarizing his report to be ‘misleading’, but stops short at doing the same to Mr Rather. It does seem he’s been found not guilty by Mr Rowe, who raises the possibility that ‘Perhaps this is part of an attempt by Rather to make a comeback after the debacle that resulted in his departure from CBS News.’
   That may be all it is. Rather knows how the media work. He has been part of them and he has been the subject of them. And just a few triggers can get people re-reporting things inaccurately.
   It’s certainly getting him in the headlines, to be sure. Just like another person we thought we would not hear from again.
   In that context, Rather is still a pretty shrewd chap in his mid-70s.
   And now that the President is so unpopular, through the vagaries of the MSM, Rather might actually wind up looking more innocent.