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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| Regular Folks Know a Lot (Unlike CBS et al.) |
| 2004-09-27 |
| EFL. Via Instapundit. In all the blizzard of words published about Blathergate over the last couple of weeks, one paragraph caught my eye. It's this one, from the September 19 Washington Post story headlined, "In Rush to Air, CBS Quashed Memo Worries." Howard Kurtz, Michael Dobbs and James V. Grimaldi wrote it. "It quickly became clear that the people CBS hired to authenticate the documents had -- and claimed -- only limited expertise in the sometimes arcane science of computer typesetting technology and fonts. Such expertise is needed to determine whether the records could have been created in 1972 and 1973. Independent experts contacted by The Post were surprised that CBS hired analysts who were not certified by the American Board of Forensic Document Examiners, considered the gold standard in the field." "Sometimes arcane science"? "Expertise
needed"? "Analysts
certified"? Granted, you want a credentialed expert when you take something to a courtroom, and CBS News ought to have had appropriately credentialed analysts backing up their story, too. But truly, there's very little arcane science involved in answering an immediate question: Was a piece of text created on a computer or a typewriter? Even more important, was a memo typed or printed in 1972? |
| Posted by:Barbara Skolaut |