COUNTERCOLUMN: All Your Bias Are Belong to Us

It's called "Truth and Duty: the Press, the President, and the Priveledge of Power."
The first chapter is online. Here are some exerpts. With, of course, my own insufferable commentary interspersed throughout, as is my wont.

We had a senior document analyst named Marcel Matley fly to New York to look at all the documents we had, the official documents that had been previously released by the White House as well as the “new” ones. After examining them for hours, blowing up signatures and comparing curves, strokes, and dots, he gave his best opinion on their authenticity. Since the documents were copies, not originals, he could not offer the 100 percent assurance that came by testing the ink or the paper.

But he said he saw nothing in the typeface or format to indicate the memos had been doctored or not produced at the time they were alleged to have been.

Hilarious.

It was another day of exhausted exultation. I got congratulatory e-mails, phone calls, and pats on the back. Other reporters called repeatedly as they worked to catch up to my story. I was thrilled.

All that changed about 11:00 a.m., when I first started hearing rumbles from some producers at CBS News that a handful of far right Web sites were saying that the documents had been forged.

I was incredulous. That couldn’t be possible. Even on the morning the story aired, when we showed the president’s people the memos, the White House hadn’t attempted to deny the truth of the documents. In fact, the president’s spokesman, Dan Bartlett, had claimed that the documents supported their version of events: that then-lieutenant Bush had asked for permission to leave the unit.

Within a few minutes, I was online visiting Web sites I had never heard of before: Free Republic, Little Green Footballs, Power Line. They were hard-core, politically angry, hyperconservative sites loaded with vitriol about Dan Rather and CBS.

The Freepers and LGF, ok. But Powerline? Politically angry? Please.

All these Web sites had extensive write-ups on the documents: on typeface, font style, and peripheral spacing, material that seemed to spring up overnight. It was phenomenal. It had taken our analysts hours of careful work to make comparisons. It seemed that these analysts or commentators---or whatever they were---were coming up with long treatises in minutes. They were all linking to one another, creating an echo chamber of outraged agreement.

Well, the fact is that the media "analysts" are overpaid and not very good. And when it comes to anything having ANYTHING remotely to do with the military, the Manhattan media has a significant demographic handicap to overcome: There are so few veterans in the Manhattan media circles that Manhattan media does not even have the perspective to realize how bad their analysis is. Anyone who has spent time reading official military correspondence could see instantly that the memos did not come from a military headquarters.

There was no analysis of what the documents actually said, no work done to look at the content, no comparison with the official record, no phone calls made to check the facts of the story, nothing beyond a cursory and politically motivated examination of the typeface. That was all they had to attack, but that was enough.

You come up with a pig and you tell me it's a dog. You even produce a dog's pedigree. But people who spend a lifetime farming pigs know a pig when they see it. And you swearing up and down that it's a pig don't make the pig look any more like a dog. But it does make you look like an idiot.

I remember staring, disheartened and angry, at one posting. “60 Minutes is going down,” the writer crowed exultantly.

My heart started to pound. There is nothing more frightening for a reporter than the possibility of being wrong, seriously wrong. That is the reason that we checked and rechecked, argued about wording, took care to be certain that the video that accompanied the words didn’t create a new and unintended nuance. Being right, being sure, was everything. And right now, on the Internet, it appeared everything was falling apart.

I had a real physical reaction as I read the angry online accounts. It was something between a panic attack, a heart attack, and a nervous breakdown. My palms were sweaty; I gulped and tried to breathe. My heart was pounding like I had become a cartoon character whose heart outline pushes out the front of her shirt with each beat. The little girl in me wanted to crouch and hide behind the door and cry my eyes out.

Remember that feeling. Maybe you'll be more careful about playing "gotcha journalism." Maybe you'll be more careful before you fuck up another story.

talked to our document analyst Marcel Matley, now back in San Francisco, who said he had seen some of the comments and dismissed them out of hand. “They aren’t even looking at the quality of copies I did,” Matley said. He disdained the anonymity of the postings, saying that any real analysts would use their name and credentials. And he pointed out something that would be a huge problem for us in the days ahead: that in the process of downloading, scanning, faxing, and photocopying, some computers, copiers, and faxes changed spacing and subtly altered fonts. He thought that this basic misunderstanding of how documents changed through electronic transmittal was behind the unfounded certainty and ferocity of the attack on the documents.

In retrospect, Matley was right and our story never recovered from this basic misunderstanding. Faxing changes a document in so many ways, large and small, that analyzing a memo that had been faxed---in some cases not once, but twice---was virtually impossible. The faxing destroyed the subtle arcs and lines in the letters. The characters bled into each other. The details of how the typed characters failed to line up perfectly inside each word were lost.

And these faxed, scanned, and downloaded documents were the only versions of the memos ever made public. A comparison of one of the documents before faxing and after faxing is in the appendix.

Heh. That didn't stop this idiot from certifying these memos as authentic. Sure, a fax distorts certain things. But it's not going to automatically put a courier typefont into the exact default settings of Microsoft Word, AND retain the integrity of someone's signature at the bottom of the page. If a fax was so distorting, then what on earth was this guy analyzing in the first place? This "analyst" is covering his tracks like a cat buries a turd.

Next time, why don't you ask the fox about the henhouse?

I was afraid that this time Matley, who was an experienced document analyst and longtime expert witness, was out of his element. He knew a great deal about documents and signatures. But I knew attack politics.

No, Mary. You THOUGHT you knew attack politics. Which is why you were so willing to believe that these memos were authentic.

Actually, 60 Minutes has a long history of slandering the innocent to make a compelling TV story. Mapes's victim complex is wearing a bit thin - especially when one stops to consider the many reputations that overzealous news producers like her have so wantonly destroyed. Richard Jewell, anybody?

I knew I could count on Dan. In tough situations, he became “fightin’ Dan,” someone who told us all to “never back up, never back down, never give up, never give in.” I was glad to hear from him and reassured by his reaction to all of it.

Not a word about a journalist's first allegiance being to the truth. I guess those days are over, if they ever existed. If these people are more interested in the fight than the truth, then they should all be fired so they can find PR jobs somewhere in the spin factories.

I was incredulous that the mainstream press---a group I’d been a part of for nearly twenty-five years and thought I knew---was falling for the blogs’ critiques. I was shocked at the ferocity of the attack. I was terrified at CBS’s lack of preparedness in defending us. I was furious at the unrelenting attacks on Dan. And I was helpless to do anything about any of it.

We vowed to work ourselves into a frenzy doing a great report on the Evening News the next night ... and we did. We put on a strong and reasoned defense. Maybe that was the problem. The people who had begun the attack on us were not interested in reason, other than the reason behind the whole assault---politics.

If Mapes were interested in reason, she and her team would have quickly produced a convincing explanation as to how it was possible for a 1973 typewriter to produce a memo using the exact same default settings as Microsoft Word 32 years later. They would have come up with a typewriter who could do it. They would have explained why their source burned the originals (Maybe to get rid of the printer ink?).

Mary Mapes has failed to stick up for her own story here. All she has is ad hominems against the bloggers, and unproven speculation about their motives. Well, if someone can demonstrate that the memos were fake happens to have a political motive, that does nothing to undercut the fact that the memos were fake. Indeed, Mapes' speculation about the motives of the bloggers is in and of itself bad journalism practice. What is the evidence that political motivations colored the obvious conclusions anyone with an experienced eye for military correspondence could have reached by looking at the document?

Yes, Mapes is still acting like a wounded wildebeest. She's demonstrated no insight so far, and demonstrated no allegiance whatsoever to the truth.

I'd have a lot more respect for her if she simply argued that the memos were fake (but I still believe the story because of A, B, and C.)

She's fighting her battle on the wrong turf here.

And her narcissism reminds me of Blair's.


Splash, out

Jason