From Cnet:
The Bush memo story has shown the Internet’s broader power of linking thousands of readers together, as much as it has demonstrated the intrinsic power of blogs themselves….
The Bush memo story has shown the Internet’s broader power of linking thousands of readers together, as much as it has demonstrated the intrinsic power of blogs themselves.
Not long after CBS aired its story on “60 Minutes II,” dealing with memos that allegedly showed President Bush’s Texas National Guard superiors raising questions about his service, a pseudonymous message board posting on the conservative FreeRepublic.com Web site called the documents a hoax.
This kind of rhetoric is common on that site’s message boards, but the author asserted that the typewriter font used in the CBS memos was anachronistic and would not have come into common use until after the alleged date of the memos.
Thursday morning, while most news services were still catching up to the CBS story, Minneapolis attorney Scott Johnson posted a link to the FreeRepublic claim on his conservative-leaning Power Line blog. The item sparked an eruption of e-mail from readers, ranging from former military officers to an IBM typewriter repairman, many doing detailed, expert-sounding analysis of the memos’ typography. Johnson posted excerpts from the messages, most of which said the memos were likely to have been forgeries.
Other conservative bloggers chimed in, posting comparisons to Microsoft Word printouts that they said looked virtually identical. Liberal bloggers spoke up too, working to dismantle the skeptics’ claims.
Ultimately the Drudge Report linked to Johnson’s site. The resulting traffic took Power Line temporarily offline, but helped raise the typographical questions to a national level.
