Media Bias, Part XXXIV

National Liberal Radio's recent update on the "Ra^therGate" fall-out suit ignores facts and never even feigns objectivity. In particular, NPR says the subsequent independent Thornburgh-Boccardi investigation, "basically gave Rather a pass and blamed the producers who reported the story and the executives who oversaw it." Yet, NPR's story quotes Rather's argument that "Nobody has ever proven the documents to be anything but what they purported to be."

Both Rather and NPR ignore the Thornburgh-Boccardi findings (especially pages 149-50), and apparently never read the typography expert's conclusions in Appendix 4. Both make clear that the memos and letters on which Rather and CBS relied could not have been produced on typewriters available on the dates atop the documents, and thus could not be genuine. Indeed, as Charles Johnson has shown, the documents' typeface, spacing and kerning exactly match the default setting on Microsoft Word, a program written a decade later:


source: Little Green Footballs

Even on follow-up stories, MSM fact-checking remains strictly optional.