The Night a Network Bet Its Reputation on Memos Typed Like a Word File

Here is a test for any newsroom in America. Take the most important document in your most important story, and ask one question: would you bet your career that it is real? Now ask a second question: would you still bet if the story's conclusion were one you dreaded instead of one you were hoping for? On the night of September 8, 2004, one of the most famous news organizations in the world answered the first question with a yes, and it never got around to the second.

I want to tell you that story, because it is the cleanest case study we have of a very old failure. The failure is not lying. Almost nobody in a newsroom sets out to lie. The failure is wanting. When a story is exactly what the room hoped to find, the usual suspicion switches off, and the checking that would have caught the error gets treated as a formality, a delay, or an insult to the colleague who found the thing.

The broadcast

On September 8, 2004, 60 Minutes Wednesday on CBS aired a report by Dan Rather about George W. Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam era. The country was about eight weeks from a presidential election. The report said that Bush had received favoured treatment to get into the Guard, and it presented several typed memos, attributed to Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Killian, Bush's squadron commander, who had died in 1984. The memos, as presented, suggested that Bush had disobeyed an order to take a physical examination and that superiors had been pressured to polish his record.

The producer was Mary Mapes, a veteran with a record of real, award-winning work. Dan Rather was one of the best-known anchors in the history of American television. Nobody involved was a rookie. That is exactly why the episode is worth studying. Rookie mistakes teach you about rookies. This one teaches you about institutions.

Understand what the memos were. They were not the originals. CBS did not have the originals. It had photocopies, and photocopies, as any lawyer will tell you, are wonderful for hiding the things that would expose a forgery: the paper, the ink, the age of the toner, the impressions of a real typewriter. Before a fake can be proved a fake, a copy has to be treated as nothing more than a claim.

The first hours

The report aired in the evening. Within hours, people on the internet were examining the memos on their screens. Early commentary appeared in an online discussion forum and then spread through blogs, which in 2004 were still a new force and were just then learning that a few thousand strangers with time and a grudge can do the work of a research department. The objections were specific, and that is what made them dangerous.

Here is how the typography questions ran, in the form that circulated that night and the next day:

1. The memos appeared to use proportional spacing, in which a narrow letter such as "i" takes less room than a wide letter such as "m". Ordinary typewriters of the early 1970s set every character in an equal-width cell.
2. A superscript "th", as in "111th", appeared in a way that looked like the automatic formatting of a modern word processor.
3. The letter shapes and the look of the whole page resembled a default font in a common word-processing program rather than the face of a military typewriter.
4. The wording and the military abbreviations in the memos struck some former Guard personnel as wrong for the period.

Defenders of the story answered at once, and I want to give them the strongest version of their reply, because it deserves a fair hearing. Proportional-spacing machines did exist in the early 1970s. Some office typesetting equipment could produce superscripts and varied letter widths. A few experts agreed that a fake could not be proved from a copy alone. The defenders said, correctly, that "it looks like Microsoft Word" is not the same as "it was made in Microsoft Word." A resemblance is an argument, not a proof.

That reply has a good deal of force, and then it runs into the question that sinks it. The burden was never on the bloggers. The bloggers were not publishing the memos. CBS was. The network had put them in front of millions of viewers as evidence in an election-season story about a sitting President. When you accuse a man of something on the strength of a document, the duty to show that the document is real belongs to the party holding the document. "You cannot prove it is fake" is a sentence that belongs in a skeptic's mouth, never in a publisher's.

The network's defence, and the retreat

For about two weeks CBS stood by the story. Executives and the anchor said that the documents had been checked, that the experts had been consulted, and that the critics were partisans. That is the second tell of a story that went wrong in the newsroom: when the criticism arrives, the first response is to question the motives of the critic. Motives are interesting. They are also irrelevant to whether a memo came out of a 1972 typewriter.

Then the ground began to move. Document examiners the network had consulted said that they had not vouched for the authenticity of what aired. One of them, a handwriting expert, said he had examined the signature only, and had cautioned about working from copies. The person who supplied the documents, a former Guard officer named Bill Burkett, gave accounts of where he got them that changed and did not hold together. Others who had been quoted as backing the story said they had been misrepresented or had doubts. By September 20, CBS acknowledged that it could no longer vouch for the authenticity of the documents, and Rather apologised on the air. He said that if the documents could not be proved genuine, they should not have been used.

That apology was worth making, and it should be credited. A network that says "we should not have broadcast this" has done something many institutions never do. It is also worth noticing how long it took, and how much had to be pried loose by outsiders to get there.

The independent panel

CBS then appointed an independent panel to review what had happened. Its two leaders were Dick Thornburgh, a former Attorney General of the United States, and Louis Boccardi, a former chief executive of the Associated Press. The panel, assisted by a law firm, issued its report on January 10, 2005. I want to be careful about what it said and what it did not say, because both halves matter.

What it did not say: it could not determine whether the documents were authentic or forged. It also reported that it found no evidence that political bias drove the story. A conservative who claims the panel proved the memos were fakes is claiming more than the panel claimed. A fair account of the record says the panel left that question open.

What it did say is the part a newsroom should tattoo on the wall. The panel found that the report was rushed to air, that its key claims were not adequately vetted, that the network failed to authenticate the documents, that it failed to find and vet the sources properly, and that the network had mishandled its response to the criticism afterwards. In plain language, the process failed at every step that mattered. The documents had been treated as authentic because the story needed them to be authentic.

The departures followed. CBS dismissed Mary Mapes, and asked three senior news executives to resign: the executive producer of 60 Minutes Wednesday and two other senior news executives. Dan Rather announced that he would step down as anchor of the CBS Evening News in March 2005, and he did, after more than two decades in the chair. Whether his exit was a punishment or a coincidence has been argued for years. It is not necessary to resolve it. The institution knew what the lesson was.

Why a story the newsroom wanted to be true gets under-checked

Let me turn from the facts to the mechanism, because this is where the lesson lives for a reader at the kitchen table.

Premise one: verification is a cost, and every newsroom is under pressure to spend less of it. Checking a document properly means finding the original, tracing the chain of custody, interviewing people who knew the author, and getting independent confirmation. Each step takes days. A competitor might publish first. The story is hot, the election is coming, and the calendar is a persuasive editor.

Premise two: scepticism is rationed, and it flows toward unwelcome news. A reporter who gets a document that damages someone the newsroom already regards with suspicion will test it, but not with the same energy as a document that hurts a friend. Nobody decides to apply a double standard. It simply happens that the questions come easier when the answer is one you would hate to print. A claim that confirms what you already believe feels like it has been checked before you have checked it. That feeling is the most dangerous instrument in the building.

Premise three: confirmation feels like corroboration. When three people who share a view tell each other a document looks right, it feels like three confirmations. It is really one opinion repeated three times. A newsroom with a settled outlook is built to produce that echo.

Premise four: the cost of an error is not shared evenly. If the story is true and the paper runs it first, the reporter is a hero. If the story is false, the cost lands on the institution, on its viewers, and on the person falsely accused. The individual gambler has an incentive that the institution should have corrected with process.

Put those four together and you have a rule of thumb that applies to every outlet, left, right or foolishly neutral: the more a story pleases the people who produced it, the more they should distrust it. That is not cynicism. It is the oldest rule of the trial lawyer, applied to the press. The cross-examiner does not ask whether the story is nice. He asks whether it is so.

The funny part, and the not-funny part

I would love to tell you the saga is only a comedy of typefaces. Picture a senior investigative team, with the combined experience of several generations of broadcast journalism, rushing to air on the strength of a page that a teenager with a laptop could reproduce in a default font in under a minute. You could not write a better sketch. The great network of Murrow had been out-forensic-ed by people typing in their pajamas, and in the first night, at that.

But the not-funny part is that a false story, or even an unproven one, does damage whatever its truth. Real questions about the military service of a man who was by then the Commander in Chief were made harder to ask, because the first major attempt to ask them ran on documents that could not be proved. When a newsroom gets it wrong, it does not only hurt the target. It poisons the well for the next reporter who has a true story and a real document. The public, burned once, shrugs at the second one. The honest journalists pay for the hasty ones.

There is a media-business point here too, and it matters to the people who run these places. A news brand is a promissory note. Viewers trust that the thing on the screen has been checked. Spending that trust on a document no one had authenticated was spending money the network did not have to spend, and it took years to earn some of it back.

The Founding angle

The Founders cared more about the press than any generation since. They protected it in the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press." They also assumed that a free press would police itself through competition, the way ideas police each other in an open market. That is what happened in September 2004, and conservatives should say so with a straight face. The system worked, in a rough and humiliating way. A rival medium with no editors and no credentials corrected a giant, and the giant, to its credit, finally reviewed itself.

Notice what did not happen. No government agency ordered the network to retract. No regulator held a hearing on the broadcast's accuracy. The correction came from competitors, critics and the network's own conscience, and that is the only kind of correction a free society should want. The remedy for a bad press is more press, plus a few hundred thousand attentive readers. The alternative, a licensed truth authority, would be far worse than anything CBS ever aired. For more on how that argument plays out in the speech cases, see The Sedition Act of 1798 Jailed a Congressman Who Won Reelection From His Cell and John Peter Zenger and the Jury That Defended American Press Freedom in 1735.

What a reader should take from it

Keep the lesson practical. You do not need a forensic lab to read a story like this. You need habits.

• Ask where the document came from. A story built on a document should tell you who supplied it and how the outlet tested it. If the answer is a shrug or a vague "experts," discount the story.
• Notice the verbs. Reporters who have verified something say "records show." Reporters who have not say "documents appear to." Read the hedges; see Seven Words Reporters Use to Tilt a Story Without Telling a Single Lie.
• Watch the response to criticism. A newsroom that answers an objection with evidence deserves respect. A newsroom that answers with a character study of the objector has told you something about its confidence.
• Reward corrections. The best sign of a trustworthy outlet is not that it never errs. It is that it errs in public and fixes it in public. The Corrections Page Is the Most Honest Part of the Paper, So Read It explains how to read those pages.
• Apply the test to your own side. A conservative who would have demanded the original of a damaging memo about a Republican owes the same demand when a damaging memo about a Democrat is waved around. A standard that works in one direction is a mood.

That last point is worth saying twice, because we are not immune. A story you want to be true is a story you are likely to share. Every outlet on the right has had its own moment of wanting. The honest course is to hold your friends to the standard you would apply to your opponents, and to say so first.

Other posts in this series on the same problem: Fabricated From the Byline Up, Four Scandals That Shamed Elite Newsrooms for the fabricators, and Why the Fact-Check Became Its Own Genre and How to Check the Checkers for what happened when the checking business turned into an industry of its own. The site's media watch page is the place to follow how stories change after they are published.

The case in brief

1. On September 8, 2004, CBS aired memos attributed to a dead Guard commander in a story about a presidential candidate's service, and the memos were photocopies the network could not authenticate.
2. Questions about typography and provenance appeared within hours, and the network's first response was to defend the story and to question its critics.
3. By September 20 CBS conceded it could not vouch for the documents. The Thornburgh-Boccardi panel's January 2005 report did not decide whether they were genuine, but faulted the vetting, the sourcing and the response, and found no proof of a political motive.
4. Dismissals and resignations followed, and the anchor left his chair in March 2005. The lesson is not about one network; it is that a story the room wants to be true needs more checking, not less.
5. The remedy was a free press correcting itself, with no licence, no regulator and no ministry of truth, which is how the Founders designed it.

What you can do: the next time a story rests on a leaked document, look for the sentence saying who supplied it and how it was authenticated, and if that sentence is missing, treat the story as unproven until it appears.