[Undertoad]

The forgery story continues and it's fascinating. I am now utterly 100% convinced of the fakery.

This explanation from a pioneer in desktop publishing goes into great detail about fonts and pseudo-kerning to explain why the memos were definitely (and obviously, to the expert eye) produced on a Windows-based computer. And then he points out Occam's razor and how deadly it is in this case...

So we have the following two hypotheses contending for describing the memos

* Attempts to recreate the memos using Microsoft Word and Times New Roman produce images so close that even taking into account the fact that the image we were able to download from the CBS site has been copied, scanned, downloaded, and reprinted, the errors between the "authentic" document and a file created by anyone using Microsoft word are virtually indistinguishable.
* The font existed in 1972; there were technologies in 1972 that could, with elaborate effort, reproduce these memos, and these technologies and the skills to use them were used by someone who, by testimony of his own family, never typed anything, in an office that for all its other documents appears to have used ordinary monospaced typewriters, and therefore this unlikely juxtaposition of technologies and location coincided just long enough to produce these four memos on 04-May-1972, 18-May-1972, 01-August-1972, and 18-August-1973.

Which one do you think is true? Which one would a 13th-century philosopher think made sense? How many totally unlikely other juxtapositions are expected to be true? How could anyone believe these memos are other than incompetent forgeries?

The hoax itself says nothing about the politics involved, nothing about Bush, Kerry or either of their campaigns. It says a TON about CBS News, Dan Rather, and the nature of the collective wisdom of the Internet. CBS claimed the documents to be honest from day one, and faced with evidence they were bogus, a CBS News exec attacked the bloggers.

Mr. Klein dismissed the bloggers who are raising questions about the authenticity of the memos: "You couldn't have a starker contrast between the multiple layers of check and balances [at '60 Minutes'] and a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing."

The top people at CBS News do not even understand the process. 10,000 guys in pajamas are far smarter than '60 Minutes'. It's not the bloggers themselves that have the ability to fact-check things; it's the collective wisdom of the Internet, in which if you bring together a community and let them communicate well, you will find a tremendous amount of expertise.

So today James Lileks uses this image to open his daily Bleat. And I think, but I'm not sure, that the typeface he uses is an IBM Selectric Composer's proportional font, perhaps even the one closest to, but not exactly, Times New Roman.