I would have thought that the last defenders of CBS memoranda might have headed the way of the dinosaurs. At the very worst, I thought I might find the true head-in-the-sand crowd at the blog I love to mock, The Filibuster. But low and behold, I come back from my "vacation" (i.e. doing nothing time) to find that none other than the Columbia Journalism Review has written a very selective attack on the blogosphere, essentially trying to revive the issue of the authenticity of the documents.

Much digital ink has already been spilled attacking the author's factual assertions (pay particular attention to the articles by Volokh and Yourish, and I'm a bit late to the game to add to them. [1] More interesting to me is why such a piece has been written in the first place. A number of theories have been raised, mostly centering on a desire for self-aggrandizement on the part of the author. But I think that's too unsubtle: I think we've just seen a prelude to CBS's best-hope outcome from it's long-awaited report.

The Kid Has A Point...
It should be noted that Corey Pein doesn't spend a word trying to evaluate or analyze any of the evidence she's presented. Indeed, the best hard evidence against her position is dismissed as "long and technical, discouraging close examination." (Amusing, because I and several of my enthralled associates analyzed it quite closely. Pein, it seems, didn't.) Similarly, there's no technical evaluation of the claims of Dr. David Hailey (original link to his work unavailable, since Dr. Hailey's taken it down), although there has been plenty of back and forth with which to do so. What is thrown up is a lot of chatter which attempts to show that blogs didn't prove that the documents were fake. What she's doing is burden shifting--but hiding the ball behind a point that's indisputable true.

Essentially, Pein is stating that if you take the blogosphere as a whole, there was a lot of hasty rushing to judgment that the memos must be false. And I'll grant her that, because when the scandals first broke, I said:

Folks, this is just goddamn dumb. The mistakes--a use of a proportional font, superscript on ordinal numbers, kerning, etc--scream out 'this document is a fake,' obvious to anyone who worked in an office in that era.

It's an admission I'm happy to make, because at the end of the day it's not particularly fatal. Even admitting all of the above, the authenticity question goes from "impossible" to "very, very improbable indeed." Unless the Columbia Journalism Review is equipped with an Infinite Improbability Drive [2], this doesn't get one's argument very far at all. At the end of the day, even using a preponderance of the evidence, things don't look good for CBS News.

...Except That the Kid Don't Got A Point
Which is where the CJR article really falls down. Pein is correct that somewhere in the blogosphere, someone is shooting off his mouth about something he doesn't know about. (Check back here every now and then. --Ed.) If you take the blogosphere as a whole, instead of specific experts or those who talk to them, you're likely to get a lot of misinformation. But that hardly suggests that the "mainstream media," as they're frequently called, charged blindly into accusations a misconduct by CBS because they were duped by spurious charges of forgery promoted by hyperactive bloggers.

What Pein ignores is that the burden of proof of authenticity was on CBS. It was not the job of CBS's critics to prove that the documents were fake: it is sufficient for them to raise questions, to which CBS should have answers. Yes, there was a lot of scholarly (and not-so-scholarly) speculation on the provenance of the memos, but that was mostly because the data needed to evaluate them was firmly in the hands of CBS, which was busy insistently protecting the journalist's favorite "oh just trust me" character, the anonymous source.

Given that, Pein completely ignores what was miserable about CBS's performance, and what the mainstream media (to its credit) picked up on in listening to bloggers: not that the criticisms of the bloggers were iron-clad--they couldn't be without access to the source material--but that CBS had no answers. Or rather, they had a stream of answers that turned out, on inspection, to be false.

So Why Is This Important?
OK, so Pein has a pernicious big point hidden inside a true little one. Why does it matter?

Despite everything that Pein puts forward, I can't think of anyone who expects the documents to be revealed as genuine. (I'd be shocked, and if they are, you'll se a retraction from me quickly.) So the question for CBS becomes one of damage control.

At the moment, the best move for CBS is to turn this from something that could only be accomplished through deliberate malice or possibly willful incompetence into someting that a mere mortal might somehow allow to slip. And here's where the blogosphere becomes an unfortunate accomplice in the trick.

You see, hundreds of pages of commentary churned over the internet in the months after Rather made his fateful 60 Minutes Wednesday broadcast. There was a lot of back and forth, charge and countercharge, with each side trying to prove what was either impossible or at least very difficult: the absolute falsehood or veracity of the CBS memos. And all of this was accomplished--for the most part--by examining a few PDFs floating about online.

This makes it look like CBS's judgment call might be a battle of the experts, and aw shucks, they just got it wrong.

And here's where I stand by the snap judgment I quoted from my original post on this subject. This wasn't a reasonable mistake, it was really goddamn dumb. Forget kerning, superscripting, proportional fonts and the other technical terms thrown around by folks who remember what hot lead is. These documents looked like Microsoft Word documents, and didn't look like what anyone would expect a typewriter from the 1970s to produce. That should have prompted greater scrutiny, at the very least, and any journalist worth his salt should have made sure that before the documents were run they were bulletproof. Answers to reasonably-expected criticism would be ready, and they wouldn't just be stonewalls.

That's not what happened at CBS. Be it through bias, malice, or incompetence, no one prepared for the backlash that should have been obvious the moment the documents were uploaded. To do such a thing in an election year, in a piece that is an attack on one of the candidates is professionally irresponsible. To not have a better answer than, "Trust me, I'm Dan Rather" isn't a mistake--it's damning.

Pein is right in that there's a double-standard in action with regards to CBS's conduct as opposed to the blogosphere, but that is simply because Mr. Rather bore the burden of proving his reporting to be true, not because the blogosphere is inherently sloppy, or the rest of the media rushed to judgment.

[1]: These factual assertions range from the trivial and indirect (he seems to suggest that Free Republic is a blog) to the downright laughable ("[Being able to reproduce a document in Word] proves nothing � you could make a replica of almost any document using Word.") This last is pretty funny considering it shows a specific ignorance of typefaces (since many typewriter typefaces weren't transfered into digital format) and indeed, a less-than-layman knowledge of forgery.

[2]: I'm unaware of Columbia researching any such thing, not even at the Columbia University Science Fiction Society. As a courtesy to the CJR, however, I will keep my eyes open for two-headed men of felonious intent.