• About Kathy Shaidle
  • Kathy Shaidle: Privacy policy

5 Feet of Fury

Kathy Shaidle's blog. Est. 2000

Fake but inaccurate? Rathergate revelations that bloggers might not want to read

April 16, 2012 By Kathy Shaidle

Ooops:

But the man officially credited with inspiring a fusillade of blog attacks was Harry MacDougald, known on message boards as Buckhead, a GOP lawyer in Atlanta who missed the segment but downloaded the Killian documents from the CBS website later that night. He specifically claimed that the memos used proportional spacing and superscripts that didn’t exist on typewriters of the early seventies.

In any case, MacDougald’s arguments about the documents turned out to be inaccurate. He acknowledged as much in an interview with me in 2008.

And in a speech given that same year, Mike Missal, a lawyer for the firm that CBS hired to investigate its own report, said, “It’s ironic that the blogs were actually wrong. . . . We actually did find typewriters that did have the superscript, did have proportional spacing. And on the fonts, given that these are copies, it’s really hard to say, but there were some typewriters that looked like they could have some similar fonts there. So the initial concerns didn’t seem as though they would hold up.”

Nevertheless, the controversy exploded in the press…

More from my site

  • If only JG Ballard had hung on for one more weekIf only JG Ballard had hung on for one more week
  • Wedding For One: My NEW Taki’s column about sologamyWedding For One: My NEW Taki’s column about sologamy
  • One MILLION downloads! (updated with press release)One MILLION downloads! (updated with press release)
  • Today in yesterday: George Jones records ‘He Stopped Loving Her Today’ (1980)Today in yesterday: George Jones records ‘He Stopped Loving Her Today’ (1980)

Filed Under: conservative blog

« ‘Take your fair share and shove it’
‘4 Ways My Moviegoing Habits Changed After I Grew Up’: my new piece at PJMedia »

Archives

Copyright © 2023 · Magazine Pro Theme On Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in