CBS - The Forgery Fantasy Network

By now we have all heard about the controversy surrounding the 60 Minutes show on Monday night in which documents were shown which purport to provide new information about President Bush's service in the Air National Guard. Well, it now seems that there are some questions regarding the documents themselves. In fact, this story has been flying around the Blogsphere all day yesterday. I myself spent some time looking at various blogs and chat rooms discussing the issue with my fellow net surfers. (there is a great thread on this at RightNation by the way.) In any case, I provide here a roundup of the story so far, but first a few of my own thoughts.

Thus, as a professional graphic artist, let me point out a few things.

First, Times New Roman has, in fact, been around for a while. Here is what Adobe's "Type on Call" CD says about it in their section on the history of the fonts included on the disk. (Every font included has related information and samples to show how the font looks at various sizes.)

In 1931, The Times of London commissioned the Monotype Corporation, under the direction of Stanley Morison, to design a newspaper typeface. According to Morison:"The Times, as a newspaper in a class by itself, needed not a general trade type, however good, but a face whose strength of line, firmness of contour, and economy of space fulfilled the specific editorial needs of the Times." Times New Roman, drawn by Victor Lardent and initially released in 1932, is the result. The Linotype version is called Times roman. Research into legibility and readability led to a design that was unique in newspaper typography; it is based on old style, or Garalde types, and has greater contrast and is more condensed than previous newspaper types. Times New Roman continues to be very popular, particularly for newspapers, magazines and corporate communications such as proposals and annual reports.

Now having said this one also has to mention a few things. Most typewriters of the period did not use proportional fonts, as has been pointed out already. And the superscript used would have been impossible on any typewriter with or without Times New Roman. For such characters to be used would require a physical extra character on the metal ball or an extra key for them to be typed on an old fashioned typewriter. As far as I know, this did not exist then, or now.

But to me the most damning evidence that this is a forgery is the use of "smart quotes" in the document. I downloaded the sample from LGF and it definitely uses smart quotes which have never, to the best of my knowledge, been used on any typewriter at any time. Typewriters use only the single and double marks for feet and inches respectively. To create smart quotes at the time would have required the use of a professional typesetting machine used in the printing industry.

These typesetting machines were used in the printing industry up until the development of computer layout and design which did not become commercially available until the introduction of the Macintosh computer and Pagemaker in the mid-eighties. Before that, all commercial typesetting was done by professional typesetters, usually in a printing environment as the machines could cost upwards of several tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars each. Also one should be aware that these machines did not print on paper, but to a piece of film which was then developed and pasted up on a light table to create a "flat" which would be use to make the final printing plate. No ordinary memo would be created this way, I would think, because it would then have to be printed on a printing press.

The point made about world wrap by some on the net is quite accurate. Most layout and design in the printing and publishing industry is done today with Macintosh computers using Adobe fonts and Postscript page description language. Every font used thus has a set of mathematical values which control the default spaces between letters, called kerning. Also the spacing between words can vary due to the specific values of each individual character since each letter has a specific amount of white space around it. These differences tend to be small, but they are there nevertheless. No typewriter would be able to do this as it requires a computer chip to make the calculations.

Thus we conclude that the use of the "smart quote" in the memo could only have been produced on a typesetting machine of the period or a modern computer. There are no other available possibilities. Thus the document is a fake.