Returned to sucking at the electronic teat today, and discovered to my great dismay that NewsDog, a newsblog run by my Berkeley buddies, is running a credulous post on the "debunking" of the Texas Air National Guard memos regarding Bush's Vietnam-dodging ass. What you need to know: this is bullshit. It is bullshit through and through. The "debunking" is so laughable that it literally makes my head hurt to think that people in the news media have been running with it. If you don't believe this yet, read the following:
- Hunter at Kos: debunking2 part 1, debunking2 part 2.
- Meha (typography designer) at Kos: further debunking2.
If journalism were a profession with intellectual integrity, then the people who credulously passed on these ridiculous allegations would be shunned. As it is, they'll probably get promoted. I mean, it takes only the most rudimentary fact-checking to determine that this idiocy about fonts is bogus. This would be like me going to the New York Times and claiming I've developed a new Java compiler with 10000% speedup over the Jikes RVM on spec2000 by eliminating no-ops from the instruction stream. And then they publish it without calling a single person with a Ph.D. in computer science --- like, for example, the many dozens of people who have hacked on the Jikes RVM. I mean this is ridiculous. It is shameful. It is fucked-up and stupid. This is a deeply sad era for American news.
UPDATE: Further and more detailed (and not trivially refutable) information is coming out regarding the forgery allegations. Well, finally. This still doesn't justify the hackishness of the people who ran with the story before they had adequate justification.
p.s. US News determines that Bush shirked National Guard duty. No memos to argue about.
Right. I heard on the radio this evening, that there are actually TWO sets of documents. One was writen up by CBS; the other by the Boston Globe. The allegations ONLY pertain to the documents used by CBS. Nobody has challenged the documents used by the Boston Globe. So even if the CBS documents were proven to be fraudulent, it would not mena that Bush is in the clear. In fact, I think we can assume that if there were problems with the Globe documents, we would have heard about it by now.
ReplyDeleteI don't have a NewsDog account, as far as I can remember.
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