of fonts and presidents
Saturday Sep 11, 2004
Finding the needle of truth in the haystack of propaganda, legalized slander and mudslinging surrounding the neverending U.S. presidential campaign is rarely easy. But a document pertaining to Bush's service supposedly written in the early 1970s with a proportional Times Roman font and superscripting identical to that used in Microsoft Office is a bit suspicious. They should have used a courier font in StarOffice or OpenOffice.org, disabled spell checking and auto superscripts. That might keep us guessing for another few weeks. And in an election that's all it takes!
Finally there is a use for that old typewriter!
Update: It looks like the jury is still out on whether this font and typeface was available to Air National Guardsmen in 1972-73. To me it seems too subtle to be an effective hoax at this point in the election cycle in an age when infomercials win Cannes awards. When I was a photographer for UW-Oshkosh's Advance Titan newspaper, one photographer hoaxed the editor and most of the staff with fake photos of his "radioactive hand" and a group of students hoaxed regional news organizations into reporting that Mercury Marine's Outboard motor testing on the Fox river was gradually moving Oshkosh north. Still, the Bush font issue is an interesting case in document forensics and proof that bloggers are performing a role in keeping traditional news organizations honest.
Final update (I hope), It took a while but CBS finally admitted that this document and similar ones may have been fake. It's tempting to gloat when bloggers trip a traditional news organization, but CBS isn't the only major news organization recently caught publishing fabricated news. The New York Times had Jayson Blair, USA Today had Jack Kelly, the New Republic had Stephen Glass and now CBS has Dan Rather. This blogger's page links to some examples of such yellow journalism. I once maintained a web page referencing junk science in the news, but I gave up because I didn't have enough web storage.
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