September 10, 2004

WHY NO HYPHENS?:

CBS stands by challenged documents on Bush (Matt Kelley, September 10, 2004, AP)

CBS News mounted an aggressive defense Friday of its report about President Bush's service in the Air National Guard, with anchor Dan Rather saying broadcast memos questioned by forensic experts came from "what we consider to be solid sources."

On Friday's "CBS Evening News," Rather said that "no definitive evidence" has emerged to prove the documents are forgeries.

"If any definitive evidence comes up, we will report it," Rather said.

The show also showed excerpts of interviews with Marcel Matley, a San Francisco document expert, who said he believed the memos were genuine.

CBS can state "with absolute certainty" that the disputed memos could have been produced on typewriters available in the early 1970s when the memos are purported to have been written, the network said. Rather said the typeface and style of the memos were available on typewriters since well before the 1970s.


The thing I don't get is that anyone who remembers what it was like to actually type something will recall that you ended up with hyphens all over the place, because you obviously couldn't wrap words and sentences automatically the way a word processor does. These documents have none. Anyone know why that would be true if he was as bad a typist as they say?

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 10, 2004 8:48 PM
Comments

And assuming a secretary typed them, oh the stories I could tell about government secretaries. Hyphens everywhere, and rarely at a syllable break.

Posted by: Fred Jacobsen (San Fran) at September 10, 2004 8:59 PM

The word of the day is "kerning." Get thee straight to Hugh Hewitt.

Posted by: joe shropshire at September 10, 2004 9:17 PM

Hyphens, hyphens, hyphens. The bane of my existence as a collegian and a law student. Not to mention all the time I had to spend twiddling the typewriter platen so that I could add superscripts for footnotes and endnotes - *in the same type size as the main text*. Looked ugly, I tell you.

Posted by: Joe at September 10, 2004 10:04 PM

Anybody who's read police or military reports would immediately be suspicious of anything neat or grammatical, never mind line breaks.

Superscripts would be an unbelievable refinement.


Posted by: Harry Eagar at September 10, 2004 10:11 PM

This is expected by CBS since if they admitted the documents were no good they would be crushed (and Kerry if it can be proved that the documents came from their camp). CBS (and Kerry's) plan is to say the documents are genuine and hope the story fades away. Given that 90% of the non-CBS people who have looked at the documents think they are bogus and that the blogosphere is all over this I don't think this is going away.

Posted by: AWW at September 10, 2004 10:57 PM

Harry:

So true. I remember first reading FBI reports reporting that the 'agent exited the OGV." Once it was translated to me by my case agent, I discovered that 'OGV' meant 'Official Government Vehicle.' Meaning that the agent got out of the car.

Posted by: Fred Jacobsen (San Fran) at September 11, 2004 12:09 AM

They can't even do a forgery right and they want to run the country and have access to the nuclear football? Yeah, right.

Posted by: Bart at September 11, 2004 7:43 AM
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