Superscript, Superscript, Wherefore Art Thou, Superscript?

The controversy surrounding the CBS scandal over the documents they produced has mostly died down following Rather's halfhearted apology. Although he states that he still believes the story is true, it is only his Democratic leanings supporting this notion, as the documents were the the first and only evidence supporting the partisan allegations.

Now though, a new report attempts to defend CBS and show that in fact, the documents were legitimate. The DailyKOS mentioned an "independent study" just released that concluded that the memos produced by CBS were in fact "not forged".

This was bold, Orwellesque start with great promise to live up to. A statement in direct opposition to nearly everything revealed so far about the memos. The facts, unfortunately just don't support it, however. In fact the conclusion, placed at the beginning of the report, so as to excuse those who simply wanted to be convinced without thinking from reading it, is so unlikely as to be laughable when looking at the evidence. Who would release a scientific looking "independent" report with so little thought? One check at OpenSecrets.org led me to my answer. The study s author, Dr. Hailey Jr., a professor at Utah State, is a Kerry supporter. Not just a supporter, but hes one of the rare Americans who actually gives money to a candidate. In this case $250.

Refuting the questions about the memos would have been a challenge considering that nearly everyone at CBS has come to the opposite conclusion, not to mention the Washington Post, and anyone else who has looked at them, with even the CBS experts saying that they never stated that the docs were legit. Even Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian, the man who supposedly authored them (deceased since 1984) had a wife and son come forward to declare that he would of never type such a casual memo, as he wrote longhand, unable to type himself. They further stated that the opinions expressed in the memos were not at all of the kind he had made to them about George Bush. And then there were also the problems with the documents themselves, dated from from 1972 and 1973, and possessed of all the features of a word processor, (proportional spacing; and my favorite, the superscript )factual errors, stylistic inconsistencies and conflicting military terminology.

So this new study refutes these points right? After reading its conclusion, I had less assurance than I did after reading the KOS headline:

Implications are that there is nothing in this evidence that would indicate the memos are inauthentic. Furthermore, from the point of view of the physical evidence in the documents (excluding any rhetorical evidence or external evidence, which is not examined in this study) no amount of additional research on the part of CBS would have lead them to exclude the documents from their 60 Minutes report.

Ok, so he is not going to take on the litany of evidence pointing to the negligible likelihood that the Killian memos were written by Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian. But he is going to tackle the issues of the superscript, (that 'th' raised up when you read "44^th President" in a modern document) and the proportional spacing strangely appearing on a document supposedly typed in the early 1970s, right? Nope. His only mention of the superscript is an absurd brushoff "The ability of the military to produce the proportional text with a superscript “th” with a typewriter is beyond question." Hmm, the Washington Post didn't think so. Neither did the New York Times. CBS itself, after attempting to refute this charge with a real Bush memo from 1968 that had a small "th" next to some numbers, were quickly alerted to yet another folly by them; the "th" was not raised as word processors do and therefore not a superscript. In a long report, this is the only mention of the superscript. Does he mean that the military can make one now? Almost nowhere in this report does he discuss the fact that what is at issue is the ability of a military typewriter to produce the word processing features in the early '70s.

And proportional spacing? He writes:

Perhaps the thing most interesting about these memos is that the typeface seems to mark the transition between monospacing [sic]and proportional spacing (Figure 3). The characters have all of the characteristics of a monospaced [sic] type, but they are proportionally spaced. The result is characters with serifs that overlap as often as not.

Indeed.

The rest of the report argues that the font was one known as Typewriter rather than Times New Roman, as cited by some experts. It also takes great pains to show that the documents were typed and not created on a pc. All of this is nice, but the features mentioned were available to common typewriters of the 1980s and 1990s, so typewriter or computer, the point is moot. There is never a mention of what typewriters were capable of, or tests of the specific machine issued for use by Killian as had been addressed elsewhere. Its as if they missed the whole point of people questioning the word processing features.

The report is concluded not by stating that the memos were authentic, or even possibly produced by machines available to Killian at the time, but as an apologia for CBS and specifically Dan Rather:

If I had been one of the experts advising CBS, I would have advised them that there is nothing physical in the memos implying they are not authentic. All indicators imply they are authentic. I would have told them that from my point of view, the memos are worthy of presenting to the public.

The DailyKOS may have misread the implications of this silly report, but that implies that they read it. During the silly season leading up to a presidential election, its not to assume anything. Reporters will lie, and professors will ramble. C'est la vie.