Killian me softly...

Okay, it was a painful pun.  But this document story is also painful in the "this is a real groaner" sense.

This article on the "Killian documents" is attracting a lot of attention today:  Ex-aide disavows Bush Guard memos Dallas Morning News 09/15/04.  (There's an annoying registration feature you have to go through to get to the story.)

I'm not going to try to "fisk" this one in detail.  The short version:  CBS stands by its story and the authenticity of the "Killian documents."  Killian's secretary in the Guard claims that the published memos are fakes, but also says they accurately represent memos that Killian actually did prepare.

The more I see of this story, the more it strikes me as a prime example of present-day media dysfunction.  It's a real reminder of how much we depend on journalists to observe some minimum standard of ethics and professional conduct.  How can even the most critical reader of the news be expected to evaluate the typeface on the documents that underlie a news story?

Something fell through the floor on media standards here, and I'm reasonably confident is was not CBS in this case.  As the CBS spokesperson noted in response to this story, "It is notable that she [the former secretary] confirms the content of the documents, which was the primary focus of our story in the first place."

Uh, yeah.  In this case, we're talking about memos dealing with known events.  The memos are consistent with the known events, e.g., the key item of Bush missing the flight physical in 1972, and are even memos that one would expect to have been written in the circumstances (though perhaps not the one about unusual pressure being put on Killian).  And two of the people who directly worked with Killian at the time confirm that the contents reflect Killian's conversations and memoranda that he wrote at the time.

Here's how I process this as someone who tries to be a critical reader of the news.  This, I might add, is in itself a partisan disadvantage for a Democrat these days, because the Foxists are glad to take stuff as fact that characters like Rush Limbaugh broadcast without any pretence of journalistic standards or ethics without asking any questions other than its partisan usefulness.

As to the authenticity of the documents themselves, this is something really only an expert in document validation could offer a truly meaningful opinion about.  If someone from CBS put the memos from which they were working in front of me, I couldn't give any technical opinion about whether the physical items in front of me represented documents likely to have been written and signed by a particular individual in the year 1972.  Nor could 99%+ of the working journalists and historians in the world.

What I could do is check to see whether the information in the documents was consistent with other known and undisputed facts about the case.  I could even do some research on National Guard regulations and procedures at the time to see if they were consistent with that.  I could get on the telephone and try to talk to a few of the surviving people who worked with him at the time to see if they could confirm anything about it.

I said I wouldn't try to fisk the Dallas Morning News article.  But I would encourage people to read it and see how uncritical the reporter was.  Again, going back to my hypothetical case of looking at the CBS documents myself, it would carry a lot of weight with me that two different people who were involved with the author at the time and were aware of some of the relevant details both validated the content of the memos.

I would also ask myself - apart from any technical physical analysis of the documents - is this the kind of thing someone would fake?  If the memo said something new and sensational - say, that Bush was dating a member of the Weather Underground in 1972 - I would be very suspicious.  If it said something that was far outside the likely knowledge of the writer, e.g., if Killian had recorded the he had heard rumors that Bush was secretly a devoted Hindu and spent all his spare time learning Sanskrit, I would also be pretty skeptical about that.

Conversely, the fact that his 86-year-old former secretary says that she's sure she didn't type those particular memos 32 years ago, though she remembers typing something very similar for the same guy, wouldn't really carry a lot of weight with me.  Because in my work, I wind up writing a lot of memos - or, these days, mostly e-mail.  And I've written lots of memos for the signature of a manager, who may make minor changes from my final draft before issuing the memo.  And if you put one of those memos in front of me - even from three years ago - and asked me if I were sure this memo was the one that manager did, I couldn't give a physical verification of the document.  I could say whether I remembered it, whether it sounded like what something my boss or I would write, and if I remembered any conversations at the time about the topic.

And if I confirmed all that, most people would conclude that the document was probably the one issued by the manager in question.  But unless the physical origin of the particular document were vital to a criminal case or something like that, most people would accept the document as likely being legitimate.

I'm reminded of the Alger Hiss case from the early days of the Cold War, the one that made a young Congressman named Richard Nixon nationally famous.  A key question in Hiss' trial on charges stemming from espionage (technically he was charged with purjuring himself under oath) was whether copies of particular documents were typed on a particular typewriter, and whether Hiss had been in possession of that typewriter.

But in this case, national media outlets have given wide credibility to quibbling questions about the validity of these documents that normally would never have made it print, sometimes seemingly without the most elementary fact-checking.  It's not a good precedent for the future, when the Republican echo-chamber can side-track even a solidly-based story in this way.

Ironically, though, it could well be a mistake in this case.  Because it keeps a media focus on Bush's National Guard career that is at minimum embarassing for him.  And CBS News, in particular, now has a special incentive to pursue the story in the aggressive way that they haven't until now.