Viewers Are Geniuses: Difference between revisions

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* During the 2004 U.S. Presidential election campaign, the CBS Evening News (at that time anchored by [[Dan Rather]]) broadcast a major report on documents that had supposedly been found by an opponent of then-President [[George W. Bush]] that purported to prove that Bush had not fulfilled his obligations to serve a specified time on active duty while in the Air National Guard in the 1970s. It turned out that the documents had been falsified, and the ensuing scandal led to Rather's ouster from CBS News. What proved that the documents were fake? The fact that the font they were typed in didn't exist at the supposed publishing date of these documents. Who noticed this? '''Internet bloggers.'''
* During the 2004 U.S. Presidential election campaign, the CBS Evening News (at that time anchored by [[Dan Rather]]) broadcast a major report on documents that had supposedly been found by an opponent of then-President [[George W. Bush]] that purported to prove that Bush had not fulfilled his obligations to serve a specified time on active duty while in the Air National Guard in the 1970s. It turned out that the documents had been falsified, and the ensuing scandal led to Rather's ouster from CBS News. What proved that the documents were fake? The fact that the font they were typed in didn't exist at the supposed publishing date of these documents. Who noticed this? '''Internet bloggers.'''
** The font (Times Roman) is a lot older than that; but most typists in 197x couldn't do such good variable-width typesetting.
** The font (Times Roman) is a lot older than that; but most typists in 197x couldn't do such good variable-width typesetting.
*** However, Times ''New'' Roman (the font used in the forgery) is not the exact same font as Times Roman, which during the 1970s was under exclusive license to the Times newspaper at any rate and would not possibly have been used in semi-official US government correspondence. In addition, variable-width typesetting was possible in that era only for typesetting machines (the one 'typewriter' capable of doing so, an IBM model, was in practice a desktop typesetting machine) and kerning (also used in the forgery) wasn't possible ''at all''.
*** However, Times ''New'' Roman (the font used in the forgery) is not the exact same font as Times Roman, and did not exist in 1973. Furthermore, Times Roman was under exclusive license to the Times newspaper in that decade and would not possibly have been used in semi-official US government correspondence. In addition, variable-width typesetting was possible in that era only for typesetting machines (the two 'typewriters' capable of doing so, the IBM Selectric Composer and the Varityper, were in practice desktop typesetting machines) and TrueType font kerning (also used in the forgery) wasn't possible ''at all''.
*** For that matter, simply looking up image scans from the Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library (the forgery's alleged date was 1973) would show you what kind of typewriter the personal secretary of the President of the United States used in that year (answer: an ordinary IBM Selectric, which uses monospaced Courier font), making the idea that a far more expensive IBM model was being used by the secretary of an obscure US Air Force colonel in the Texas Air National Guard completely laughable.
*** For that matter, simply looking up image scans from the Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library (the forgery's alleged date was 1973) would show you what kind of typewriter the personal secretary of the President of the United States used in that year (answer: an ordinary IBM Selectric, which uses the fixed-width Courier font), making the idea that a far more expensive IBM model was being used by the secretary of an obscure US Air Force colonel in the Texas Air National Guard completely laughable.


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