Dan Rather launches gutsy newsgroup to counter fake news & alternative facts

[mnhtnbb]

33. Much better than the movie is the book written by Mary Mapes--the producer--

upon which the movie was based.

on p. 7 of her book she writes:

I was told that the first posting claiming the documents were fakes had gone up on Free Republic before our broadcast was even off the air! How had the WEB site even gotten copies of the documents? We hadn't put them online until later. That first error-filled and overblown entry, posted by a longtime Republican activist lawyer who used the name "Buckhead," set the tone for what was to come.

There was no analysis of what the documents actually said, no work done to look at the content, no comparison with he official record, no phone calls made to check the facts of the story, nothing beyond a cursory and politically motivated examination of the typeface. That was all they had to attack, but that was enough.

and on p. 8

I talked to our document analyst Marcel Matley, now back in San Francisco, who said he had seen some of the comments and dismissed them out of hand. "They aren't even looking at the quality of copies I did," Matley said. He disdained the anonymity of the postings, saying that any real analysts would use their name and credentials. And he pointed out something that would be a huge problem for us in the days ahead: that in the process of downloading, scanning, faxing, and photocopying, some computers, copiers, and faxes changed spacing and altered the appearance and detail of fonts. He thought that this basic misunderstanding of how documents changed through electronic transmittal was behind the unfounded certainty and ferocity of the attack on the documents.

In retrospect, Matley was right and our story never recovered from this basic misunderstanding. Faxing changes a document in so many ways, large and small, that analyzing a memo that had been faxed--in some cases not once, but twice--was virtually impossible. The faxing destroyed the subtle arcs and lines in the letters. The characters bled into each other. The details of how the typed characters failed to line up perfectly inside each word were lost.

And these faxed, scanned, and downloaded documents were the only versions of the memos ever made public. A comparison of one of the documents before faxing and after faxing is in Appendix 1.

She goes on to say though

As I watched the postings pile up and saw the words quickly become more hateful, it dawned on me that I was watching the birth of a political jihad, a movement conceived in radical conservative back rooms, given life in cyberspace, and growing by the minute. It fed on political anger and the deep-seated belief that CBS News was a longtime liberal stronghold out to get the president.