In all the blizzard of words published about Blathergate over
the last couple of weeks, one paragraph caught my eye. It’s this
one, from the September 19 Washington Post story headlined, “In Rush to Air, CBS Quashed Memo
Worries.” Howard Kurtz, Michael Dobbs and James V. Grimaldi wrote
it.
It quickly became clear that the people CBS hired to
authenticate the documents had — and claimed — only limited
expertise in the sometimes arcane science of computer typesetting
technology and fonts. Such expertise is needed to determine whether
the records could have been created in 1972 and 1973. Independent
experts contacted by The Post were surprised that CBS hired
analysts who were not certified by the American Board of Forensic
Document Examiners, considered the gold standard in the
field.
“Sometimes arcane science”? “Expertise…needed”?
“Analysts…certified”? Granted, you want a credentialed
expert when you take something to a courtroom, and CBS News ought
to have had appropriately credentialed analysts backing up their
story, too. But truly, there’s very little arcane science involved
in answering an immediate question: Was a piece of text created on
a computer or a typewriter? Even more important, was a memo typed
or printed in 1972?
The same kind of looking-down-the-nose insularity hung about the
suspicions raised of one “Buckhead,” the Free Republic poster whose
early questioning of the Killian memos’ typefaces seemed to have
kicked off the whole Memogate controversy. He must have been some
Republican plant, the Dem activists insisted. The timing was too
suspicious. He knew too much. When Buckhead was revealed to be an
Atlanta attorney with Republican affiliations, well, that cheesed
it. Karl Rove had sent Buckhead a message; Buckhead had enlisted
the VRWC with a few well chosen words, and there you go.
For Buckhead stuff, see here. For a complete recap of Free Republic posts on
the origin of the controversy, see here.
BUT CONSIDER HOW MUCH REGULAR FOLKS KNOW. If you have not been
famous or otherwise insulated, you have likely had half a dozen
jobs by the age of 50. You have perhaps started, or tried to start,
your own business. You have moved at least four times in adulthood,
and bought and sold perhaps that many houses or condos, You have
researched a number of areas of the country and lived in two or
three (and not just Washington, New York, and Los Angeles). You
have perhaps served a military hitch. You have had children in
public schools or you’ve been home-schooling; you’ve raised funds
for a church or a lodge or a Boy Scout troop. In some context or
other, you have sold something door to door, published a
newsletter, sold advertising, served on a committee, had a hand in
hiring and firing.
If you’ve ever had a hobby, you probably have an expert
education in something like motorcycle mechanics, photography,
flying, firearms, railroad history, or ornithology.
Just to the matter at hand: Like Buckhead, who is a 46-year-old
lawyer, you have probably had to work with, or even specify the
purchase of, several computer systems. Indeed, you’re old enough to
remember when there were no computers in offices. You have
participated in the entire computer revolution. You’re old enough
to have learned to type on a typewriter, and maybe even to have
worked on one.
So what’s the big mystery? Not that ordinary people knew
“arcane” things about typefaces and spacing, but that the big
machers at CBS didn’t know perfectly ordinary things.
To have detected these forgeries did not require: Knowing the
difference between Times Roman and Times New Roman, knowing the
difference between the look of Times Roman printed from MicroSoft
Word versus the look of the same typeface set by a Varityper,
distinguishing chemical characteristics of printing inks, or —
shades of Ellery Queen — differentiating between the signature
idiosyncracies of one Underwood manual typewriter’s key bars versus
another’s.
It required making an ordinary observation: “Hey, these things
don’t look like they were typed in 1972.” It just required being
part of the real world.
“Out of touch” doesn’t even begin to describe what CBS did —
what CBS News is.
