Fact Checking--Traditional Media Loses the Mandate of Heaven

CBS's Sixty Minutes re-opened the "Bush AWOL at National Guard" story, based on purported newly unearthed documents from the Texas Guard. The memos say Bush was a no-show, but political influence forced the Guard to cover-up. The formerly sensible, but now Kerry fan, Andrew Sullivan pronounced the information "devastating."

Nope--turns out, the papers are forged. Powerline and LGF have the details, including (from Powerline):

UPDATE 12: In the August 18, 1973 memo "discovered" by 60 Minutes, Jerry Killian purportedly writes:

Staudt has obviously pressured Hodges more about Bush. I'm having trouble running interference and doing my job.

But wait! Reader Amar Sarwal, citing Peter Nuss, points out that General Staudt, who thought very highly of Lt. Bush, retired in 1972.

Two points:

1. The media will sacrifice their honor to beat Bush.
2. Dispersed bloggers kick the media's ass.

Tune-out the nets, cancel the newspaper--the mandate of heaven's moved on. Old media's dead; long live blogs.

More:

Mark Steyn provides play-by-play for "the day old media died:"

Unfortunately for CBS, Dan Rather's hairdresser sucks up so much of the budget that there was nothing left for any fact-checking, so the ''60 Minutes'' crew rushed on air with a damning National Guard memo conveniently called ''CYA'' that Bush's commanding officer had written to himself 32 years ago. ''This was too hot not to push,'' one producer told the American Spectator. Hundreds of living Swiftvets who've signed affidavits and are prepared to testify on camera -- that's way too cold to push; we'd want to fact-check that one thoroughly, till, say, midway through John Kerry's second term. But a handful of memos by one dead guy slipped to us by a Kerry campaign operative -- that meets ''basic standards'' and we gotta get it out there right away.

The only problem was the memo. Amazingly, this guy at the Air National Guard base, Lt. Col. Killian, had the only typewriter in Texas in 1973 using a prototype version of the default letter writing program of Microsoft Word, complete with the tiny little superscript thingy that automatically changes July 4th to July 4^th. To do that on most 1973 typewriters, you had to unscrew the keys, grab a hammer and give them a couple of thwacks to make the "t" and "h" squish up all tiny, and even think it looked a bit wonky. You'd think having such a unique typewriter Killian would have used a less easily traceable model for his devastating ''CYA'' memo. Also, he might have chosen a font other than Times New Roman, designed for the Times of London in the 1930s and not licensed to Microsoft by Rupert Murdoch (the Times' owner) until the 1980s.

Killian is no longer around to confirm his extraordinary Magic Typewriter, but his son denied the stuff was written by his dad, and his widow said her late husband never typed. So, on the one hand, we have hundreds of living veterans with chapter and verse on Kerry's fantasy Christmas in Cambodia, and, on the other hand, we have a guy who's been dead 20 years but is still capable of operating Windows XP. It took the savvy chappies at the Powerline Web site and Charles Johnson of ''Little Green Footballs'' about 20 minutes to spot the eerily 2004 look of the 1972 memo.

Instapundit calls it "Ra^therGate." Hugh Hewett summarizes the flood of forgery evidence; Charles Johnson drives nails into CBS's coffin with a .gif image comparing the purportedly typewritten 1972 letter with the same content on Microsoft Word; a similar comparison (by an LGF reader) is here. Headlines the LA Times: No Disputing It: Blogs Are Major Players."

"If the font needed time travel, you must fire Dan Rather."