Notes and Memos
And like a "your note draft is finished" gift, CBS has fired four employees over the RatherGate Memos flap. As almost anyone in the blogosphere knows by now, because let's face it, you heard it before you heard it here.
If you can stomach 234 pages of lawyer-speak, the full report is here, and it doesn't pull many punches in a lot of areas, although they aren't convinced that political bias was involved. I'm going to lay my bias claims on the firm reasoning of one of my fellow students, who once exclaimed, "Why doesn't the left ever get gifts like this?" Well, mainly because if these had been Swift Boat documents, someone would have noticed the presence of Times New Roman at the appropriate interval, which is about five seconds.
While the report itself is also fairly agnostic as to whether or not these are forgeries, Appendix 4 contains the biggest non-news event ever. In pretty much the only real forensic evidence presented in the piece, document examiner Peter Tytell suggests that the Killian Memos were typed on a computer in Times New Roman font.
The summary of Tytell's analysis is good, and it's good that the Panel included it. But if there is a whitewash in the report, it's the same whitewash that has occurred at every stage of the RatherGate investigation: pretending that this was a tough call.
It wasn't. Those documents had webbed-feet serifs, flappy wingdings[1] and now a very expensive lawyer's bill for an investigative report, simply to tell us that all along Dan Rather was holding a duck.
[1]: No, there were no wingdings in the report. It's a metaphor, work with me here.
