he left-wing lapdogs at Media Matters purport to have exposed me for my statement on “Reliable Sources” this past Sunday that the Thornburgh Report on the CBS 60 Minute II story found the Burkett/Mapes documents to be forged (transcript here). However, I didn’t quite say that. As the segment with Salon’s Eric Boehlert and me was closing, Boehlert said that Thornburgh “couldn’t” and “wouldn’t” conclude that the documents were forgeries. I responded, “It’s on page 175.”
It’s true that the Report avoids stating a definitive conclusion that the documents are fakes; it merely endorses Peter Tytell’s analysis that the documents are “not authentic.” It does so on page 175. This is a little-known fact that simply hasn’t penetrated the mainstream media reporting on the Mapes fraud. If the documents are not authentic — if they are not what they purport to be — they are fakes.
At pages 174-175 the Report notes that typeface expert Tytell told CBS on September 10, 2004, two days after the broadcast, that the documents had been prepared in Times New Roman typeface — “a typeface available on modern computers but one that didn’t exist on typewriters in the 1970s.” On page 175, the Report states: “The [Thornburgh] panel met with Tytell and found his analysis sound in terms of why he believed the documents were not authentic.” The Report cites its detailed summary of Tytell’s analysis included in Appendix 4 to the Report, adding that no conclusion was reached “as to whether Tytell was correct in all respects.”
If the Thornburgh Report finds Tytell’s analysis regarding the inauthenticity of the documents to be “sound,” as it does on page 175, the only rational conclusion one can draw is that the documents are fakes. But ratiocination is a commodity in short supply among members of the alternate-reality based community.
JOHN adds: While some issues of typography relating to the documents are disputed, others are not. To my knowledge, no one has questioned Tytell’s statement that no typewriter of the early 1970s (or, I believe, any other time) was licensed to use Times New Roman font. That being the case, the documents are blindingly obvious fakes.
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