When Will Dan be Done?

Whizbang is off to a rollicking start this morning (and last night) in covering the latest on Rathergate. Late yesterday he posted about Howard Fineman's appearance on Scarborough Country, where he said:

"...I think what we're all selling is credibility. And I think in the big media, let's not say main stream or whatever, in the big media credibility for the accuracy of what you report is what our business is. And that has to be kept in mind at all times. If we in the big media are going to survive in this new world of the Internet, and bloggers, and so forth, we have to sell even more and care even more about our accuracy, because it's easy to stick anything out there on the Internet. Hopefully we do have the quality control, and the editorial judgment, and the journalistic experience so that when readers and viewers and web surfers come to our name brand they can trust what they do [big media journalists]. That's what makes this issue so big in journalism and journalistic circles."

On Rather's lame defense during last night's newscast, he (as I did below) found the guest experts unconvincing:

"The first [guest] was Bill Glennon who used to be a typewriter repair man. He said all the functions (th, proportional spacing, etc) were available as SPECIAL ORDER items at that time. Their typewriter repair guy DID NOT mention which model with be able to do any of these things on the same document. We know the Selectric composer is out."

On CBS's odd claim that preventing a superscript "th" would be a lot of trouble (as I said yesterday, if you're forging a document, so what?), Whizbang had this reaction to yesterday evening's show:

"The other thing Mr. Katz noticed was that one of the TH's was small and one was regular size. (May 1972 memo) He claimed that would mean someone would have to go and turn that feature off and on in Word. Not so-- A single space between the 111 and the TH would make Word not automatically make it a superscript. (111th would super, 111 th would not) From the memo you can not tell if there is a space or not. Hardly "definitive" as our friend Dan likes to say."

Even less trouble than I'd thought.