CBS "Memos" Are Fake - Why did CBS Ignore the Discrepancies?

The Washington Post has documented the issues many people have found with the documents. These "memos" are obviously fake.

The question is, why did CBS News, a news organization, display these documents as real to the American public when they have such obvious discrepancies to the memos produced by the air national guard?

Article

CBS News President Andrew Heyward, who joined the network 23 years ago as Rather's producer, said his staff was extremely careful with the story. "We have a thorough vetting process," Heyward said last week. "Everyone was aware this was a high-stakes story." He approved the piece, Heyward said, because "we felt it was ready."

Rather also dismissed the notion that CBS was negligent: "I'm confident we worked longer, dug deeper and worked harder than almost anybody in American journalism does."

We, as a people who are dependent on information to make decisions, are in deep trouble.

Tests run by Thomas Phinney, fonts program manager for Adobe Systems, show that none of the possible font widths available on any typewriter or any IBM device from 1972 are able to produce an exact replica of the CBS documents. "Can they do something 'similar'? Sure," Phinney said. "Could they produce those exact memos? Impossible."

CBS obviously didn't try very hard to authenticate the memos. The question is why?

Rather said that if the memos were indeed faked, "I'd like to break that story." But whatever the verdict on the memos, he said, critics "can't deny the story."

As the days begin to blur for Josh Howard, he embraces the same logic: "So much of this debate has focused on the documents, and no one has really challenged the story. It's been frustrating to us to see all this reduced to a debate over little 'th's."

What story? Without facts there is no story! What has happened to the news? Today we aparently don't need supporting material - facts. We can just say whatever we want to and make it a "story?"

Give me a break.

What is happening to our news? And this is not a light topic of coversation. The American people depend upon knowing the truth in order to make appropriate decisions for the good of our country. If instead we are fed lies and "stories" about what somebody wants us to believe, we cannot do what is right. The disservice CBS News did to the American people is vastly underappreciated.