Watching a Train Wreck
Via Instapundit, here's at least one of the precious people "close to Colonel Killian when the memos were written" that CBS interviewed:

Retired Maj. General Hodges, Killian's supervisor at the Grd, tells ABC News that he feels CBS misled him about the documents they uncovered. According to Hodges, CBS told him the documents were "handwritten" and after CBS read him excerpts he said, "well if he wrote them that's what he felt."

Hodges also said he did not see the documents in the 70's and he cannot authenticate the documents or the contents. His personal belief is that the documents have been "computer generated" and are a "fraud".

Judas priest! What are they doing over at CBS?! Then, this comes up again:

The man named in a disputed memo as exerting pressure to "sugar coat" President Bush's military record left the Texas Air National Guard a year and a half before the memo was supposedly written, his own service record shows.

An order obtained by The Dallas Morning News shows that Col. Walter "Buck" Staudt was honorably discharged on March 1, 1972. CBS News reported this week that a memo in which Staudt was described as interfering with officers' negative evaluations of Bush's service, was dated Aug. 18, 1973.

I've also heard it said that Bush's street address on the memos is two years out of date.

You know, CBS could've fixed this. It would've been simple for Dan Rather to come out and say "We were in error, and in the interest of preserving our journalistic integrity, we're retracting Wednesday night's report. We have launched an investigation to determine how this happened to ensure that it never happens again." No, they sent Rather out to insult every thinking person in the CBS audience and every blogger who has covered this idiocy, to lie.

It's a shame it's come to this, too. The changes in the media could've come by evolution, gradual changes as the "old media" learned how to play with the "new media". Instead, it's come to this, where companies go broke, careers are wrecked and once-great newspapers are reduced to tabloid status. Congratulations, 60 Minutes, on blowing your chance to set this right.

Certifiable Bull Shit

"To err is human but to really foul up requires a computer." - Dan Rather, who probably can't see the irony.

Tonight, an angry, battered Dan Rather lashed out at "internet...partisan political operatives" for daring to question his reporting. As promised, I'm here to fisk this garbage, and will address the relevant points:
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CBS To Talk About It
For those who aren't aware, I was just passed a media alert that Dan Rather is going to talk about this on tonight's CBS Evening News, which just started here in the Eastern and Central time zones. I'll have more afterwards.

Update: So far, my response is "FUCK Rather."

Update: Disgusting. I'll be on later with a transcript, a fisking, and an advertiser list for you to boycott.

Like the Saddam statue coming down...
Kelli Edwards hasn't responded to my email, but it's more or less a moot point now: They're screwed. CBS tried to argue that 60 Minutes did their fact-checking over the phone...

A senior CBS official, who asked not to be named because CBS managers did not want to go beyond their official statement, named one of the network's sources as retired Maj. Gen. Bobby W. Hodges, the immediate superior of the documents' alleged author, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian. He said a CBS reporter read the documents to Hodges over the phone and Hodges replied that "these are the things that Killian had expressed to me at the time."

"These documents represent what Killian not only was putting in memoranda, but was telling other people," the CBS News official said. "Journalistically, we've gone several extra miles."

...but one person he clearly never told this to was his wife, who says this sounds nothing like him.

"The wording in these documents is very suspect to me," she told ABC News Radio in an exclusive phone interview from her Texas home. She added that she "just can't believe these are his words."

Meanwhile, CBS is going totally apeshit, and Drudge describes Dan Rather as "shell-shocked".

You know, CBS has a clear journalistic responsibility here: 60 Minutes promotes itself as a paragon of investigative reporting. If their information was bad (and it was), they need to tell their audience, period. No half-assed "maybes" "might haves" or "could bes". The documents are clear forgeries which have been picked up by dozens of other major news sources around the world, and they need to retract their report in a very public fashion.

Update: Interview with a Danrather.

DAN RATHER, CBS NEWS ANCHOR: I know that this story is true. I believe that the witnesses and the documents are authentic. We wouldn't have gone to air if they would not have been. There isn't going to be -- there's no -- what you're saying apology?

QUESTION: Apology or any kind of retraction or...

RATHER: Not even discussed, nor should it be. I want to make clear to you, I want to make clear to you if I have not made clear to you, that this story is true, and that more important questions than how we got the story, which is where those who don't like the story like to put the emphasis, the more important question is what are the answers to the questions raised in the story, which I just gave you earlier.

Ridiculous. "Don't ask us where the story came from! Just believe us! Quit bringing up factual points about how this document CANNOT BE REAL, because it IS! Trust us! WE. ARE. THE. NEWS!"

This just makes me want to organize a boycott of 60 Minutes advertisers, and if they don't retract and apologize Sunday night, I will be doing exactly that. Meanwhile, Tim Blair has one of the funniest news roundups in blog history.

Update: Belmont Club - "The Shot Heard Round The World"

CBS
More over at Powerline.


On the left: A confirmed signature from Colonel Killian. On the right: The signature used on the CBS memos.

Why, it's almost as though it were signed by an entirely different individual! Meanwhile, AllahPundit, like the folks over at Powerline, note numerous continuity and procedure problems with the memos. (Also here.) Meanwhile, Politburo Diktat finds an authenticated memo proving that Kerry was in Cambodia!

60 Minutes using forged documents to attack Bush?
Little Green Footballs has some nifty stuff on this. It appears that some of the "documents from 1972" that came out of "Colonel Killian's personal file" that 60 Minutes used as "proof" that Bush didn't fulfill his National Guard duties were made on Microsoft Word. Killian, conveniently, died in 1984. Pacetown did the same thing in Photoshop with another memo, using, again, standard 12 point Times New Roman. Worse yet, because of simple differences in spacing methods used in 1972, there's just no way these came out of a machine from the early 70's. Absolutely pathetic.

Update: On that note, Edward Wasserman has the nerve to whine in the Philadelphia Inquirer that "newsrooms [are] under siege" because "the country's best-staffed and most influential news organizations" being "inspected" and "denounced by a free-floating cadre of rightist warriors", "zealots who believe they already know what the story is".

No, we just want you to stop sitting up at night inventing make-believe sources on your laptop.

Update: Allah Pundit has more on this, and INDC checked it out with a PhD forensic examiner.

I asked him to put a percentage on the chances that this was a fake, and he said that was "hard to put a number on it." I then suggested "90%?" Again he said it's "hard to put an exact number, but I'd say it's at least that high, sure. I pretty much agree that that font is Times New Roman."

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There is no God but God...
On the other hand, Tim Blair reports on yet another bizarre move by the ever-amusing New York Times.

The wire services reported, in a quote printed in thousands of newspapers, that the captured Beslan terrorist said, "By Allah, I did not shoot."

Today's Times piece quotes him as saying, "By God, I did not shoot"- a translation that no other news organization has used.

In other words, the Times wanted so badly to leave Islam out of its Beslan feature that it altered the terrorist's quote.

That is, in fairness, quite a moderate piece of bias by NYT standards. Meanwhile, Daniel Pipes notes various terms used to describe the mass murdering terrorists at Beslan. My two favorites:

Commandos - Agence France-Presse
Activists - the Pakistan Times

Oh my.

Bush Senior vs. The UPC Scanner
Instapundit catches the New York Times repeating the old story about Bush Sr. being a"bewildered" by grocery store barcode scanners. That's rather sloppy journalism, because that story was false. The true irony, of course, is that it was sloppy journalism at the New York Times in 1992 that created the story in the first place:

Andrew Rosenthal of The New York Times hadn't even been present at the grocers' convention. He based his article on a two-paragraph report filed by the lone pool newspaperman allowed to cover the event, Gregg McDonald of the Houston Chronicle, who merely wrote that Bush had a "look of wonder" on his face and didn't find the event significant enough to mention in his own story. Moreover, Bush had good reason to express wonder: He wasn't being shown then-standard scanner technology, but a new type of scanner that could weigh groceries and read mangled and torn bar codes.

I keep getting the impression that the New York Times should really be right up there next to the grocery store barcode scanners, along with the rest of the tabloids.

Update: Hehe.

Look, if I read that Bill Clinton ate Big Macs in disregard of the cholesterol risk, and then report that Bill Clinton ate Big Macs in order to boost his cholesterol, I have gone awry.

Revealing Phraseology
MassBackwards has a couple good bits on media terminology in referring to folks who just slaughtered a couple hundred men, women and children: here and here.

Here's the summary of the terms used in this article by CNN to describe these vermin:

Hostage Takers - 7 times
Rebels - 5 times
Militants - 3 times
Abductors - once

The only time they dared to use the word "terrorist", they made sure to put it in quotation marks AND use the word "quoted" alongside it.

Check it out. Personally, I'd call them "killers". I guess they can't get anybody excited by reality: Their man Kerry has an election to win!

The Media Sickens Me
Associated Press: WEST ALLIS, Wis. - President Bush (news - web sites) on Friday wished Bill Clinton (news - web sites) "best wishes for a swift and speedy recovery." "He's is in our thoughts and prayers," Bush said at a campaign rally. Bush's audience of thousands in West Allis, Wis., booed. Bush did nothing to stop them.

Reality: Click here for the audio from the event.

This was not an innocent mistake, and when the Associated Press was informed by readers that they were aware of this, AP pulled the story, added notes to the raw wire story to pull that line, made no comment about the lie in the portion for release, and changed the byline, presumably to conceal the author. Instapundit is all over it here and here.

Reporting Back to the Future
Instapundit links to this piece on "Laphamization".

I was not expecting to be deluged with instances, not just of predetermined storylines, but of predetermined stories. As it turns out, news organizations were writing, editing and publishing stories all week about events that had not yet happened.

Now, most of these examples of media back-to-the-futurism were pikers compared to the egregious blunder made by Harper's magazine's Lewis Lapham who wrote about the entire GOP convention before it happened and for whom we've named the journalistic mistake. But the sheer number of them is revealing.

Yeah, it really is.

What Calculating Bastard Media?
Massbackwards has a theory on why the broadcast media doesn't really cover the incriminating details of accusations against Kerry:

One final thought on the overwhelming lack of anything remotely resembling balanced news coverage by the mainstream media. There's been a lot of talk about how the major TV networks are apparently in bed with the DNC and desperately want Kerry to win this race. I honestly think, that just like the junior senator from Massachusetts, the networks are looking out for no one here but themselves.

Put it this way - you're watching a baseball game, and the score is 24-2 in the 3rd inning. Even if it's YOUR team that's winning, chances are you will decide there are better things you could be doing with your free time than sitting on your couch with your eyes glued to the set. The networks know all too well that if they were to present their viewers with all the facts regarding these recent shenanigans, expediting the collapse of the Kerry campaign in the process, the sound of millions of viewers all across America turning off their televisions would be deafening.

TV journalism is big business in this country, even more so during a presidential election year. It's in their best interest, finacially, to have two dogs in this race right up to election night. Not that it will do them much good. I can see it backfiring on them as their viewers turn to alternate sources of news and information and realize what a bunch of stooges the networks have been playing them for.

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I Blame the Media Blamers
The police chief of Najaf is one angry dude. He's so angry, in fact, that he ordered his men to round up dozens of journalists in Najaf and truck them to his office so he could yell at them for a while. The journalists all agree that they're outraged, but what they don't seem to be able to agree on is just what the police chief was yelling at them about. That's funny, because, well, they're reporters. First, we have the AFP version, as reported by Al Jazeerah.

After a two-minute drive from the hotel, where journalists from across the world are based while covering the battle between al-Mahdi Army militiamen and US occupation forces city, the reporters were taken to the office of the police chief.

"You people are not under arrest," Najaf police chief Ghalib al-Jezari told them.

"You are brought here because I want to tell you that you never publish the truth. I speak the truth, but you never broadcast what we are."

The police chief complained that reporters have been misreporting the proposed visit to Najaf by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the revered Iraqi Shiite Muslim leader.

Well that didn't tell me much. So, I kept digging. Not surprisingly, The Guardian offers a rather different account.

Journalists from Arab and other international media, including the entire BBC team, as well as the Guardian, the Independent, Times and Daily Telegraph, were pushed into a truck, which was driven off to Najaf's police station where the local chief of police, Ghalib al-Jazae'ri, said he was incensed by media reports in which Grand Ayatollah Sistani had allegedly urged his followers to descend on Najaf.

He said: "You are not under arrest but you will listen to us to see what disasters you have caused."

The police chief, whose father has been kidnapped by supporters of Moqtada al-Sadr, said the police base had been repeatedly mortared and many of his officers killed. After half an hour, he allowed journalists to leave.

Strange... The Guardian makes no mention of misreporting anything. In fact, it seems that they're implying that the police chief is trying to keep them from reporting on al-Sistani at all, doesn't it? Curiously, Knight Ridder takes it to yet another plateau, trying to blame the cops for not being prepared for a reporter attack.

At the station, An-Najaf Police Chief Ghaleb Hashem al-Jazairi told journalists they were detained because the Dubai-based satellite television channel Al-Arabiya had reported that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the most prominent Shiite Muslim cleric in Iraq, would arrive in An-Najaf today to lead a demonstration.

The chief said his forces were unprepared for the news to go out Wednesday night and that as a result at least two Iraqis who arrived early for Sistani's march were killed during clashes with police.

Some officers also accused reporters of inciting violence against government institutions such as the police and armed services.

"We were attacked by 14 mortar shells tonight, and we expect more, so you're going to stay with us in this room to see what we go through,'' one officer told the journalists crowded in the chief's office.

Well gee, the Iraqi cops think the the journalists are actively trying to get them killed, so we can definitely trust that they're getting the story right! In any case, Knight Ridder appears to claim that the chief told them that the media acted so darn fast that the police couldn't react in time to... do... uh... something. The problem is that I was watching CNN this morning, and they were rather confused about Al-Sistani's visit, too. Seems they had some bad information. Clearly, someone misreported something, right? Let's try again. This time, I found an extended version of the AFP story, in Australia's Herald Sun.

Naming a Middle East television NEWS channel, he said the cleric had not decided as to when he would come to Najaf, adding "but the channel has gone ahead and said he is already in Najaf".

Yep, that's what CNN was confused about. Funny how when a paper actually includes the facts, a news story suddenly comes together.

He said the news had triggered a march by people of Kufa to Najaf which turned violent forcing police to fire as some "bad elements in the march fired at the police".

The irony is stifling in here. The Najaf police chief brings them in to lecture them on their sloppy, irresponsible work, because it's getting people killed, and that's a problem, so as soon as they're dismissed, they immediately start writing vague, half-assed, contradictory accounts of the same meeting, at which they were all not only present, but were actually the topic. Nothing gets by these guys!

If this isn't incompetence, it's a deliberate effort to avoid reporting that they've been accused of incompetence. (It's almost as though they can't look their readers in the eye!) Worse yet, perhaps they think the real story is that they were detained at all, since it's totally beyond their comprehension that their credibility could be questioned.

If these "journalists" spent more time checking their facts and digging up the whole story (not to mention less time pushing personal agendas and nursing their own egos), perhaps they'd not get into these situations in the first place. After all, inciting a deadly riot and being dragged out of bed by the angry locals who had to clean up after your bumbling is, in most lines of work, some kind of sign.

Update: Reuters wants to play, too. I don't know if they had any journalists there or not, but they don't even bother to mention that there was a purpose to the detainment at all. Can't have any reporting, after all, this is Reuters we're talking about.