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Heads rolled at CBS News last week as four people were fired because they failed to check the accuracy of some documents which purported to show that George W. Bush shirked his National Guard duties more than 30 years ago.
The story, which aired right after Labor Day last year
as the presidential campaigns were heating up, was
initially defended by CBS, since the documents are
backed up by not only independent handwriting and forensic
experts but by sources familiar with their content.
Meanwhile, out in cyberspace, bloggers were questioning
the documents on account of their typography: a
proportional font instead of a monospaced typewriter font,
and the superscripted th
in a date were the main
reasons to question the validity of the documents.
That typography could not have been produced by the most common word-processing system used by the military in the early 1970s -- a manual typewriter, usually loaded with carbon paper. I know because I used one in the orderly room at Ft. Leonard Wood, Mo., during my brief military engagement.
CBS should have known better. As for the examiners of the documents who pronounced them authentic, it's not the first time that a major media organization has been misled in this way.
In 1983, the German magazine Stern came out with selections from the hitherto unknown and unpublished diary of Adolf Hitler after paying $2.3 million for 60 hand-written notebooks. Foreign rights were sold for millions to the London Times and America's Newsweek.
There were three experts, all of whom had worked with law-enforcement in Europe on document examination, who confirmed their validity by comparing Hitler's known handwriting to the diaries. A distinguished historian, Hugh Trevor-Roper, also vouched for their authenticity.
But as it turned out, the paper had an additive not used before 1954 and the ink was less than a year old. The diaries had been forged by Konrad Kujau, who sold them to Stern. He had been forging Nazi documents for years -- one of the samples that the experts used for comparison had actually been produced by Kujau.
Back in 1971, there was a stunning announcement that the reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes had produced an autobiography in conjunction with writer Clifford Irving, who had tape-recorded Hughes's life story during dozens of secret meetings in Mexico and the Bahamas.
Life Magazine and McGraw-Hill had paid $750,000 to
Irving, whose work was backed by documents which, the
handwriting experts said, were definitely in Hughes's
handwriting: It would be beyond human capability to
forge this mass of material.
And the documents were
consistent with what was known about Hughes.
Only when Hughes made a public statement denouncing Irving as a fraud was the hoax revealed.
Closer to home, there was a claim in 1883 to 18,750 square miles of Arizona Territory by James Addison Reavis, who had forged hundred of documents to support his claim to a Spanish land grant.
Despite all of those authentic-looking documents, most
Arizona newspapers denounced Reavis as a fraud. However,
George Hearst, the owner of the San Francisco Examiner, was
also a mining man, and one historian notes that Reavis was
a possible way to capitalize on his mining claims in
Arizona. He allowed Reavis to hype the Peralta grant in
unsigned Examiner articles, a valuable propaganda ploy for
the forger.
When Reavis pressed his land claim in federal court, investigators found hundreds of forgeries and inconsistencies. His claim was denied in 1895 and he went to jail for three years.
Was George Heart suckered by Reavis, or did he just use Reavis's fake claims to advance his mining interests?
It's hard to tell at this remove, but it should be clear that newspapers, magazines, book publishers and networks have been fooled before, that experts can often be wrong about the provenance of documents, and that it will happen again, no matter how many people CBS fires.
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