Rob Cannon

 CBS has been trumpeting new documents (from 1972 and 1973) that purport to show that President Bush was given preferential treatment during his days in the National Guard.  The problem is that the documents where created with Microsoft Word!

Typography experts were suspicious when they noted that the letters and memos used proportional fonts and superscripts, features that were very uncommon in the early 70’s.  In all likelihood, these documents would have been produced on a typewriter and not a word processor.  So some bloggers started their own investigating and found that when they retyped the documents into Microsoft Word, the spacing and line breaks EXACTLY matched these “30 year old” documents.

What I find interesting here is that bloggers are able to get on this news much faster than the professional news organizations.  CBS, with all of their experience and experts, were not able to notice that these documents were faked.  I wonder how long it will take for CBS to fess up? 

UPDATE 1:
I did not make this post as a political comment.  You will note that I did not comment anything one way or another about Bush or his service.  My interest in posting this was for two reasons (both technically related as this is a technical blog).  The first reason was that Microsoft Word was (allegedly) used to fake these documents and I find it interesting that whoever produced these documents did not notice that there was anything about them that would not pass for a document created in the early 70's.  The second reason was the involvement of blogging in uncovering this foregery.  It took one blogger to notice the use of new type setting techniques and another blogger took it even further by comparing the output of MS Word to the documents posted by CBS.  I find the speed at which a key portion of a major news outlet's big story was shown to be false by the blogsphere to be a telling sign of the changes that are coming in how we get news.

Short answer, please don't make comments about Bush and Iraq and Kerry, etc...  That is not what this is about.

UPDATE 2: Debunking of the debunking being debunked...
I followed the link about the debunking and I saw this update “you might have noted that the White House did not release those records, they merely passed along without comment copies that had been sent to them by CBS“.  So, it looks like Boing Boing was just plain wrong.