Mary Mapes, former CBS News Producer, is still whining and lashing out at Conservative blogs because she got her hand in the cookie jar over forged documents. Mary Mapes Blames 'Vicious' Bloggers.
For those of you who have forgotten or never heard of it, CBS' 60 Minutes did a hit piece on George W. Bush over his Texas ANG service just before the 2004 election. They produced documents that "proved" his being AWOL from the ANG. The problem was there was no way a 60's/70's era typewriter could have produced these letters. Of course, there is no original to look at, only a copy of a copy of a copy. But what is there is enough.
You see, modern word processors use what is known as proportional spacing. That means a small letter like an "i" uses up less space than a wide letter, like a "w". But in an old typewriter, they used fixed spacing, where the "i" and "w" took up the same amount of space, because the strikers that made the letters were the same width.
Then there is the superscript that really started the ball rolling. Again, when you type something like "101st", Word will superscript the "st" like this: 101st. It's not anything you can turn off, it does it automatically. The problem is, there is no way to do it on the old clunky typewriter except by physically clicking the platen back a notch and typing the st. But in that case, the st would have been the same size, not a smaller font like it is in a superscript.
These two facts about these memos was enough to force Dan Rather to resign, and get Mary Mapes and others to be fired. Enough doubt was cast upon the memos as to make them worthless.
Mapes said that she still believes the documents cited in the "60 Minutes II" broadcast by her boss, Dan Rather, were authentic, saying; "I feel that if they had been forged there would have been a flaw. And I have not been able to find the flaw."
But in the paragraph before this, she says,
"What happened to me, I think, and to all of us at CBS, was that the perception of truth became that these documents were not real; that there were flaws in the typeface and all kinds of sort of dry and extremely dull details about proportional spacing and superscript and all that."
"Dry and extremely dull details"? I think she just insulted every document verifier who does this for a living.
And of course an internal investigation would not turn up that the documents were fake, because that would out-and-out admit that the documents were forged, and CBS had an agenda against the President, and lots of other things that would hurt their reputation.
What's left of it anyway.
