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Sunday 6 December 2015

The Truth About Truth and Peter Tytell

 The real Dan Rather and the real Mary Mapes at the Truth New York special screening at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema on October 23.
CBS knew what typewriters were, and how they were used - Above: 1. William Shirer. Below: 2. Edward R. Murrow (even in an election year).
CBS knew what typewriters were, and how they were used - Above and below: 3. and 4. Walter Cronkite.
CBS knew what typewriters were, and how they were used - Above: 5. Dan Rather himself (with a Texas Olympia?). Below: 6. Morley Safer.
7. Cronkite again.

3 comments:

Bill M said...

I never expect Hollywood to create anything near truthful in any matter but entertainment to earn big dollars. The American news liberals are more interested in creating sensationalism over proper reporting and truthfulness too. Sometimes they are forced into getting things right when independent reporters get involved.

Great report on the movie.

Richard P said...

Fine story. I hadn't been tracking on Peter Tytell's contributions to the debate; he, of course, is an unsurpassed expert.

I haven't seen the film, because all reviews agree that it's a self-righteous, self-serving glorification of people who, whatever their other virtues might be, were dead wrong on this story and failed to observe journalistic standards—not to mention common sense.

Here's a link to my own technical analysis for those interested: Are the Bush Documents Fakes?

Ted said...

I found it amusing to hear to what lengths CBS went to ascribe those documents to the IBM Composer, especially once I obtained one. You learn pretty quickly that the Composer has a completely unique 9-unit escapement which, even if you could match the font exactly (and you can't, because the typefaces themselves are cut to match the Composer's limited escapement spacing, unlike digital fonts) then the spacing between words and letters could not be matched by computer composing that is not limited to 9 units of escapement spacing. Heck even the measurement of a "point" is different between any mechanically or photo-typeset text and computer generated text thanks to Adobe's correction of a 200-year-old mis-measurement. It's sad that Rather ended his career on this low note, but frankly, he deserved it.