The Brennake Gambit: Guarding Against Straw Man Disinformation Stings from Spike1138 on Vimeo.
Old School Journalism - get two sources who will confirm on the record, plus deep background.
Only fight for what you KNOW to be provebly true. Or they with Dan Rather you....
Also referred to as "memogate," Rathergate is the scandal surrounding the 60 Minutes II story aired on CBS in 2004 about George W. Bush's National Guard service. Memos providing the basis for many of the claims in the report were supposedly created in 1973 and found in the files of the late Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian. Bloggers and blog readers investigated the suspicious looking documents which were made available to the public on the CBS website and found them to almost certainly be poor forgeries created on a modern era word processor. Four CBS employees lost their jobs over the report. Dan Rather famously defended the report, claiming the memos might be "fake, but accurate" and later went into early retirement.
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Background: Media treatment of Bush Guard Service
The story of George Bush's Texas Air National Guard service is an integral part of the story of Rathergate. It is the claims regarding the facts of Bush's service that formed the basis for the story that became known as Rathergate. There were five essential claims made about Bush's Guard service.
Ancillary to these claims were additional claims that, as a result of the facts alledged, Bush was "AWOL", "a deserter" and "a coward" and that he "joined the Guard to avoid going to Vietnam". Click on Bush Guard Service for an extensive background on media treatment of George W. Bush's service in the National Guard.
Timeline
08 24 2004 Burkett offers to meet with Mapes and Smith to share the documents he posses concerning President Bush.
09 02 2004 Burkett provides two documents to Mapes claiming they are copies of originals obtained from Killian's personal files via Chief Warrant Officer George Conn.
09 05 2004 Burkett provides four more documents to Mapes claiming they are copies of originals obtained from Killian's personal files via Chief Warrant Officer George Conn.
09 05 2004 CBS interviews Robert Strong, a friend of Killian's who ran the Texas Air National Guard administrative office.
09 06 2004 CBS interviews General Robert "Bobby" Hodges, a former officer at the Texas Air National Guard and Killian's immediate superior at the time.
09 08 2004 CBS news magazine 60 Minutes II airs story about George W. Bush National Guard service, featuring memos said to be written in 1973 and found in the files of the late Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian.
09 08 2004 Commenter "Buckhead" at Free Republic website notices that the memos are proportionally spaced font which did not come into common use for office memos until the introduction of word processing software.
09 09 2004 Power Line blog posts The Sixty-first Minute where information is compiled from readers including an IBM typewriter expert. A reader points out the suspicious superscript "th" in the memos, which would have been virtually impossible to create on a 70's era typewriter.
09 09 2004 Charles Johnson of the blog Little Green Footballs copies one of the Killian memos into Microsoft Word and finds it is an exact match to the memo supposedly typed in 1973.
09 09 2004 CBS News releases a statement saying the memos were "thoroughly investigated by independent experts, and we are convinced of their authenticity.
09 10 2004 On the CBS Evening News, Rather dismisses critics of the story, whom he describes as "partisan political operatives."
09 10 2004 A CBS memo reiterates the company's confidence in the authenticity of the documents.
09 11 2004 A CBS News segment states that document expert Phillip Bouffard states that the documents could have been prepared on an IBM Selectric Typewriter, available at the time.
09 13 2004 Rather states that analysts and other experts strongly insist the documents could have been created in the 70s.
09 15 2004 Document authenticators Emily Will and Linda James both stated that the memos were of very poor quality and would not authenticate them.
09 20 2004 CBS stops defending the documents and reports that their source, Bill Burkett, "admits that he deliberately misled the CBS News producer working on the report, giving her a false account of the documents' origins to protect a promise of confidentiality to the actual source."
09 21 2004 CBS News addresses their contact with the Kerry campaign.
11 09 2004 Mary Mapes gives an interview to ABC News correspondent Brian Ross stating that the docuemtns have never been proven to be forgeries.
01 05 2005 Independent Panel Report (Thornburgh Report) released.
01 10 2005 CBS News reports four employees ousted for their roles in the 60 Minutes II story.
01 25 2005 Senior Vice President, Betsy West and Senior Broadcast Producer, Mary Murphy resign.
03 25 2005 Executive Producer Josh Howard resigns.
03 2005 Dan Rather resigns.
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