Just a song before I go

Before the media's latest excuse for some back-stabbing and self-flagellation - the report over CBS's airing of memos, attributed to Colonel Jerry Killian, about Shrub's Texas Air National Guard disservice - fades into the general landscape, waiting to be plucked out by some right winger to distract attention from some future misadventure of their fellow reactionaries, go here and read the article in the January-February issue of "Columbia Journalism Review" about the real failing: how the media failed to provide either balance or context to the story.

CBS's critics are guilty of many of the very same sins [as the network]. First, much of the bloggers' vaunted fact-checking was seriously warped. Their driving assumptions were often drawn from flawed information or based on faulty logic. Personal attacks passed for analysis. Second, and worse, the reviled MSM often followed the bloggers' lead. As mainstream media critics of CBS piled on, rumors shaped the news and conventions of sourcing and skepticism fell by the wayside. ...

[T]here was a double standard at work. Liberals and their fellow travelers were outed like witches in Salem, while Bush’s defenders forged ahead, their affinities and possible motives largely unexamined. ...

When the central charge is a cover-up, as it was in the CBS story, vigilance is required. Thus, the connections between Bush's old associates should have seen print. Together the men formed a feedback loop, referring reporters to one another and promoting a version of events in which Bush's service is unquestionable, even exemplary. With such big names and old grudges in play, journalists are obliged to keep digging.

But they didn't, letting, as they usually do these days, the right wing set both the agenda of the coverage and its tone.

Now, for what it's worth, I think the memos themselves are fake. Some of the "debunking" claims, such as that typewriters of the time couldn't do superscript, that they couldn't do proportional fonts, that the Times New Roman font didn't exist at the time, and the like, are demonstrably false. But there are a number of other issues relating to language, paper size, formatting, and several more. None of them are particularly compelling in isolation, but the idea that a single memo would have contained all of these anomalies stretches my credulity farther than it will go. So I'm prepared to accept the physical documents provided to CBS are fraudulent. However, that's irrelevant to the issue CJR addresses, which is how the media dealt with the story, and the answer is miserably.

What's more, there's another issue here, which is why I carefully referred to the "physical documents." If I took a quill pen to artificially-aged parchment, wrote "I wrote the draft of the Declaration of Independence," and signed it "Thomas Jefferson," such a document would obviously be fake. But would the information in the document be fake? Just as clearly, no.

The controversy about the authenticity of the documents themselves served a valuable purpose for the Shrub gang: It distracted attention from the authenticity of the information in them, which was almost completely ignored.

The Killian documents include the following accusations:
1. An order directing Bush to submit to a physical examination. This order was not carried out.
2. A note of a telephone conversation with Bush in which Bush sought to be excused from "drill." The note records that Bush said he did not have the time to attend to his National Guard duties because of his responsibilities with the Blount campaign.
3. A note that Killian had grounded Bush from flying for failing to live up to the standards of the U.S. Air Force and the National Guard and for failure to submit to a physical examination. Killian also requested that a flight inquiry board be convened, as required by regulations, to examine the reasons for Bush's loss of flight status.
4. A note (labeled "CYA" for "cover your ass") claiming that Killian was being pressured from above to give Bush better marks in his yearly evaluation than he had earned. The note attributed to Killian says that he was being asked to "sugarcoat" Bush's performance. "I'm having trouble running interference [for Bush] and doing my job."

(Sidebar: That list comes from the entry about the memos in Wikipedia. Wikipedia can be a great resource, but because it is by design in a constant state of being edited by its users, when the issue involves current controversy or a topic that can exploited for political purposes, it must be used with great caution. In this case, reading the discussion page connected to the article reveals a few people, transparently ideological in their bias as they give great credence to the accusations of Swift Boat Veterans for Lies, going to great lengths to use and edit the piece in a way that gives sole attention to the authenticity of the documents to the exclusion of the accuracy of their contents, even to the point of arguing that the question of accuracy is irrelevant. Caveat lector.)

Those are serious charges, some of which - such as Shrub being grounded for failing to take a physical - are documented from other sources. The key part of these particular documents, what they are important for revealing, is the statement that Killian felt he was getting pressured to give Shrub better marks than he deserved. Is that true?

Well, the Washington Post discovered through a source at CBS News that one of CBS's sources in authenticating the memos was

Maj. Gen. Bobby W. Hodges, the immediate superior of the documents' alleged author, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian. [The source] said a CBS reporter read the documents to Hodges over the phone and Hodges replied that "these are the things that Killian had expressed to me at the time." ...

[CBS] regarded Hodges's comments as "the trump card" on the question of authenticity, as he is a Republican who acknowledged that he did not want to hurt Bush. Hodges, who declined to grant an on-camera interview to CBS, did not respond to messages left on his home answering machine in Texas.

But after having stayed hidden for a day, Hodges emerged with a completely different story, telling ABC News

that he feels CBS misled him about the documents they uncovered. According to Hodges, CBS told him the documents were "handwritten" and after CBS read him excerpts he said, "well if he wrote them that's what he felt."

Now I have to say that if I were on a jury charged with deciding which of those statements was more credible, I would unhesitatingly choose the first. First because candor about people you don't want to hurt, especially powerful people you don't want to hurt, is always easier to come by anonymously. Second because the latter version requires two deliberate acts of deception by CBS: calling typed memos handwritten and distorting his answer well beyond what could be ascribed to a misunderstanding. The fact that such deceptions could be easily revealed speaks strongly against their likelihood.

And there's one other thing: Hodges was contacted, as the quote above from the CBS source makes clear, as part of an effort to authenticate the documents. Hodges' claimed statement "if he wrote them that's what he felt" does not address that issue one way or the other. It's very difficult to imagine any fact-checker accepting a statement beginning with "if" as any sort of proof and leaving it at that without pressing Hodges further. So all in all, I don't buy the revised version.

But even if that doesn't sway someone, Marian Carr Knox should. She was Killian's secretary during the time in question and she had this to say:

"I typed memos that had this information in them, but I did not type these memos. There are terms in these memos that are not Guard terms but that are Army terms. They use the word 'Billets.' I think they were using that to refer to the slot. That would be a non-flying slot the way we would use it. And the style ... they are sloppy looking," she says. Yet she says that "The information in these memos is correct - like Killian's dealing with the problems."

"I know that I didn't type them. However, the information in those is correct," Knox told CBS anchor Dan Rather.

What's more, she also told the New York Times

"We did discuss Bush's conduct and it was a problem Killian was concerned about. I think he was writing the memos so there would be some record that he was aware of what was going on and what he had done." She added that Killian had her type the memos and locked them away in his private files. She did not believe the CBS documents were real, due to inconsistencies, but said the content is accurate and was perhaps copied from the originals.

(Note: This is from the Wikipedia article on the memos, linked above; the Times article is now in a for-pay archive.)

That is, she has steadfastly maintained that while the documents are false, the information is correct.

So, to sum up: Are the documents authentic? No. Is what they say true? Yes. Does that mean that at the very least there were attempts to get Shrub special treatment? Yes. Was that significant point consistently overlooked or downplayed in the media coverage, which almost slavishly followed the right wing line on the story? Yes. Are the media generally pathetic? Yes.

Will this incident be used as ammunition by the right to deny future unfavorable stories? Damn straight.