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Finally, the media turn their sights on the president. But Kerry supporters shouldn't get too excited by the claims of gossip diva Kitty Kelley and a flawed CBS report.
BY DAN KENNEDY
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Typecast
THE BLOG TRIUMPHALISTS are shouting that it’s a victory for new media over old. Writing in the New York Post, John Podhoretz said that the discrediting of CBS’s 60 Minutes story on George W. Bush’s National Guard service was the result of a "populist revolution." Jay Currie wrote on TechCentralStation.com, "One day. That was all it took for the ranks of citizen journalists to swarm and then thoroughly discredit a story which ran in the New York Times, the Boston Globe and on a network news magazine." The Wall Street Journal’s John Fund called it a "watershed media moment." Well, yes and no. There’s no doubt that conservative weblogs raised some serious questions about four memos that CBS featured in its report. (Currie’s allegation that the Times’ and the Globe’s reporting had also been discredited appears to be nothing more than a cheap shot.) The problem is that though many of those bloggers may believe they also answered those questions, a fair-minded observer would conclude otherwise. The contents of the memos, purportedly typed by the late lieutenant colonel Jerry Killian in 1972 and ’73, are pretty damning. Among other things, they claim that Bush failed to comply with an order to undergo a physical, and that a superior officer, Colonel Walter "Buck" Staudt, had pressured Killian to "sugar coat" his evaluation of Bush. In the 60 Minutes report, Dan Rather did not reveal from whom CBS had received the memos, but he did say that the network had verified their authenticity. (He stood by the documents’ authenticity in follow-ups on the CBS Evening News on Friday and again on Monday.) The same evening as the 60 Minutes broadcast, according to various accounts, someone posted a message to FreeRepublic.com, an ultraconservative Web site, charging that the memos couldn’t possibly have been typed in the early ’70s. The reason: typewriters in those days didn’t have the Times New Roman typeface, proportional spacing, and superscripting (as in the "th" in "111th") that are clearly visible in the Killian memos. That was picked up by conservative weblogs such as Power Line and Little Green Footballs. The proprietor of the latter, Charles Johnson, conducted what to my eyes was a fairly impressive test: he banged out one of the Killian memos on his computer, using Microsoft Word’s default settings, and found that it matched up perfectly. But wait. Almost immediately liberals blogs, such as the Daily Kos, began producing evidence that top-of-the-line IBM typewriters from that era included all the features seen in the Killian memos. Some who must have far sharper eyesight than I do even went so far as to assert that Johnson’s test document differed in several key ways from the memos. What had seemed to be a fairly transparent case of forgery suddenly appeared in a new light. Clearly it was at least possible that Killian — or maybe a secretary, or one of the men who served under him — had typed those memos on an IBM typewriter, though computerized forgery still stood out as perhaps somewhat more plausible. Then there was the battle of the experts. Particularly at issue was a forensic analyst named Philip Bouffard, who was quoted in the Washington Post and the New York Times as saying that the documents appeared to have been written on a computer. The Boston Globe had a scoop on Saturday, reporting that Bouffard had apparently changed his mind, and had found a document showing that the military had been testing an IBM typewriter with the capabilities in question as far back as 1969. "You can’t just say that this is definitively the mark of a computer," Bouffard was quoted as saying. But within hours, a weblog called INDC Journal was reporting that Bouffard had sent an e-mail complaining that the Globe had misrepresented what he’d said. "What the Boston Globe did now sort of pisses me off, because now I have people calling me and e-mailing me, and calling me names, saying that I changed my mind. I did not change my mind at all!" according to the e-mail, which went on to say that Bouffard and his colleagues were "more convinced" that the memos had not been produced on a typewriter. Bouffard’s incendiary e-mail was the talk of the blog world for several days. But on Tuesday, Bouffard responded to my e-mail query by saying that it was the headline he objected to, not to the way he had been treated in the article. That headline — AUTHENTICITY BACKED ON BUSH DOCUMENTS — did, in fact, make it look as though Bouffard had changed his mind, when he says that all he was really doing was "checking out some new information." Bill Ardolino, the blogger behind INDC Journal, told me by e-mail, "Well, that’s a bit surprising, as I presented his raw remarks without any alteration. I can somewhat understand why Bouffard would say that part of the story is ok, though, because the body of the Globe’s story quoted him with complete accuracy, if possibly selectively (as I highlighted on my blog). Unfortunately, it was the headline that was an outright lie. In no way was the ‘authenticity backed’ by Dr. Bouffard. The fact that that is deceptive is beyond question." Mark Morrow, a deputy managing editor at the Globe, says that Bouffard also spoke with reporter Francie Latour — co-author of the Saturday piece — on Monday night. "He told her that having read the story now, that he has no problem with our story now, that he doesn’t feel that he was misquoted in any way," Morrow says. His remarks are consistent with what Bouffard told me. "We might address the headline, which was more emphatic than the story was," Morrow adds, "and may have been the source of the tenor of the comment on the piece" — a reference to the blizzard of e-mails and phone calls to which the Globe had been subjected since the weekend. (On Wednesday, the Globe published a correction that said the headline "did not accurately reflect the content of the story.") Of course, the lack of complete resolution over the typography issue didn’t stop anti-Kerry forces from pushing the story way beyond what was known. On Friday, Rush Limbaugh read on the air an anonymously sourced piece from the right-wing American Spectator’s Web site claiming that the documents may have come from the Democratic National Committee. Howie Carr, on his WRKO Radio (AM 680) talk show, called it a Kerry "dirty-tricks operation," on the basis of no evidence whatsoever. It’s likely the mystery of the Killian memos will never be solved one way or the other, although it’s worth pointing out that neither Killian’s widow nor his son thinks they’re genuine; that Buck Staudt had been retired for a year and a half when he was supposedly pressuring Killian to "sugar coat" things; and that retired colonel Bobby Hodges, who’d told CBS he believed the memos were authentic, has since changed his mind. All those factors offer pretty strong evidence that the documents were forged. So does a Tuesday story in the Washington Post by Michael Dobbs and Howard Kurtz, in which CBS’s own expert, Marcel Matley, backed away. On Tuesday night came a new development: the Dallas Morning News reported that Killian’s former secretary, Marian Carr Knox, believes the documents are fake, but that they reflect actual memos that once existed. Stay tuned. The bloggers deserve plenty of credit for raising the right questions; if they hadn’t, the authenticity of the Killian memos might never have been challenged. The fact remains, though, that the answers to those questions wouldn’t have come without a big assist from old media. The lesson: reporting still matters. — DK
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THE MEDIA DO NOT cover a presidential campaign as though it were one long, seamless story. Through the eyes of the media, each campaign is more like a book, with distinct set pieces, improbable plot shifts, and cliffhangers aimed at whetting the audience’s interest in the chapters to come. In this race so far, we’ve already read "The Triumph of Howard Dean" (late 2003), "Kerry’s Amazing Comeback" (winter), "When Bushies Attack" (spring), "Reporting for Duty" (July), and "The Revenge of the Swifties" (August). Sometime around Labor Day, the story line began to shift again. Maybe it was the boredom of having to cover the Republican National Convention, which could have been titled "When Bushies Attack II." Maybe it was a sense that Kerry’s torment had gone on long enough. Whatever the case, the battering to which the media had subjected the Democratic candidate for the previous five weeks eased ever so slightly, as new twists and turns arose that put Bush on the defensive. It began with a sensational if dubious splash. On September 5, the Sunday edition of London’s Daily Mail offered a sneak preview of gossip diva Kitty Kelley’s forthcoming book, The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty. Kelley claims, among other things, that George W. Bush snorted cocaine at Camp David in 1989, while his father was president; that he may have helped a girlfriend get an abortion; and that his future wife, Laura Welch, both smoked and sold pot when she was a student at Southern Methodist University, in Texas. The mainstream media, for the most part, approached Kelley’s book with tweezers and rubber gloves, which probably was not a bad idea. But The Family had zoomed to number one on Amazon.com by this past Tuesday, the same day that Kelley began three mornings of interviews on NBC’s Today show. Then, on September 7, at a campaign appearance in Des Moines, Vice-President Dick Cheney came within millimeters of asserting that Osama bin Laden wants Kerry to win. "It’s absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on November 2, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we’ll get hit again, and we’ll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States," Cheney said. No real surprise there. Scaring the hell out of the public has been the overriding theme of the entire Bush-Cheney campaign. This time, though, the media uproar was immediate and loud, forcing Cheney to say several days later that he didn’t really say what everyone knew he had said. It got only worse on September 8, the day that the newspapers all ran headlines about American military deaths in Iraq topping 1000. That morning, the Boston Globe reported that Bush had failed to sign up with a Boston-area National Guard unit, as he was obligated to do, after he began attending Harvard Business School in 1973. Bush spokesman Dan Bartlett had to admit that he’d misspoken in 1999 when he’d told the Washington Post otherwise. Also, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote about a former military officer named Bob Mintz, who told a pretty convincing tale of having looked for Bush and having been unable to find him when Bush was supposedly serving in Alabama in 1972. BUT NEXT CAME the inevitable plot twist. That night, CBS’s 60 Minutes weighed in with perhaps the most widely seen piece to date on Bush’s National Guard non-service. And the once-great news organization blew it. Dan Rather interviewed Kerry fundraiser Ben Barnes, a former Speaker of the Texas House and a former lieutenant governor, who said he — much to his sorrow — had helped Bush and other well-connected young Texans avoid combat service in Vietnam by securing them posts in the National Guard. The program also featured four newly discovered documents allegedly written by Bush’s then–commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Killian, that shed light on the future president’s failure to take a required physical while he was in the Guard, and on the special treatment he had received. Within 24 hours, though, it was clear that CBS had a fiasco on its hands. Driven largely by conservative weblogs, credible — if ultimately unprovable — allegations were made that the documents had been forged. Barnes’s own daughter accused her father of lying. And a key source backed away from his earlier claim that the documents were legitimate (see "Typecast" page 17). Rather defended the story on his Friday-evening newscast in a performance that could have taken its name from one of Killian’s reputed memos: "CYA." By early this week, the furor over the documents had abated somewhat, as it became clear that definitive proof one way or the other would almost certainly not be forthcoming. Still, the plot that seemed to be emerging before the 60 Minutes report aired — a wide-ranging attack on Bush — may have been derailed, at least temporarily. The cover line on the current issue of Newsweek is THE SLIME MACHINE, with images of two small television sets, one featuring Kerry, one featuring Bush, each in their military uniforms. The article, by Howard Fineman and Michael Isikoff, contends that this is "the most vituperative presidential campaign since the divisive days of Richard Nixon." Indeed it is, though Fineman and Isikoff’s construct is misguidedly evenhanded. If this campaign is destined to be fought over who did what in the 1960s and ’70s, the media need to tell the public the truth: that the claims raised against Kerry by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth have been almost entirely discredited by their own past statements, by the official record, and by what Kerry’s crew members say. In contrast, there is no question Bush knew that by serving in the Texas Air National Guard he would almost certainly avoid Vietnam. And there are reams of evidence to suggest that Bush blew off a significant part of his Guard obligation.
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