Writing in response to both my and John Hinderaker's criticisms of his own account of the CBS News-forged documents scandal, the Columbia Journalism Review's Corey Pein has sent an open letter to Romenesko.
Pein begins by saying "Many critics of my article on the CBS memos, the blogs, and the press have obviously not read it." Well, now wait a minute--isn't this just the sort of wild-eyed conclusion-jumping that Pein himself finds so objectionable in others? I mean, how could he prove whether or not someone has read his piece?
For my own part, I did read Pein in his entirety. Sadly, I can't say that he returned the favor. Pein writes: "Last complains that I hold up David Hailey’s typographic study to show that the memos might be real. To prove that Hailey’s study was 'debunked,' Last cites the very bloggers who hounded Hailey--without compelling evidence of fraud."
I'm afraid I neither use the word "debunked," nor mention David Hailey in my piece--at all. Perhaps Pein is thinking of someone else.
3 hours ago
2 comments:
[T]he fact that the Killian documents don't resemble some other documents from the period seems a week reed to prove anything.Pein dismisses several key arguments against the Killian documents by saying that they don't "prove anything." And considered individually, he's right - there's no one piece of evidence that proves the documents are frauds. But when you look at the evidence in total, there's only one conclusion to draw.
P.,
I looked at those documents - and don't notice any superscript "th"s, joined "fi"s, or curly-quotes. The typeface looks very different. All that's similar about them, it seems to me, is the proportional typeface - and we've known from the start that there were a couple of typewriters capable of producing proportional type in the early '70s.
Jon, Pein was trying to construct a counter-narrative, and essential to his argument is the idea that we can't really tell for certain whether the documents are fakes. And granted, we'll never be able to know to a "metaphysical certainty." But I think the bloggers & Newcomer's analysis has proven it "beyond a reasonable doubt." Perhaps we'll learn more later today, no? In fairness to Pein, I don't think he claimed 60 Minutes II acted responsibly.
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