| Friday, September 21, 2007 |
09:07 - This reporter promises to be more trusting and less vigilant in the future
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So last night, at the gym, I noticed that Dan Rather was on Larry King, talking for a whole hour about how CBS had set him up with a story about documents they knew were fake so as to "pacify the White House", or something.
Now, the sound was off, and I didn't watch much of it (preferring, instead, a couple of episodes of Home Movies on my iPod); but I suppose it's too much to hope that Larry King, at some point in the interview, held up a copy of the memo in question as well as a freshly printed one that he'd typed up himself in Word and printed out on the studio office printer, and said, "So, Dan... you're a lifetime journalist. You are surely familiar with Microsoft Word. In fact, you would have to be one of the people on the planet most familiar with Word, having to spend your entire professional life writing and proofing documents of your own. So: didn't you at some point notice that something looked funny about this document you were going on the air to show off? Did something about the fonts, the margins, the spacing, all seem somehow... I don't know... familiar? Didn't a little tiny voice in your head mutter that maybe, just maybe, something fishy was going on? That if CBS was setting you up, maybe you could notice this before running the show, and, I don't know, do some research to ensure that it's all for real first? You know, just askin'."
I doubt it somehow, cynic that I am. Especially since his defenders still insist that research and expertise in the field of typography is a sign of obsessive partisanship, and that we should all be more credulous and take journalists like Rather and Mapes at their word. Because they're all objective, like.
Ah well. OJ's in the news again, I see. Some old favorites just won't die, huh?
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Brian Tiemann
