Besieged Gunga Dan serves up spitballs on Monday night's CBS Evening News; WaPo and NYT slam them back at high velocity!

Via Ratherbiased, with the help of a sharp-eyed reader's email pointers, here's transcript of Dan Rather's latest defense on the Ra^thergate docs on Monday night's "CBS Evening News" broadcast.  And you can watch a streaming video of the broadcast here, listed as "Bush Military Debate Goes On." 

Rather's discussion on Monday night included the "lower-case Ls versus numeral-ones" issue that one of Dr. Newcomer's latest updates addresses, as I mentioned in my previous post to this one.

I'd blog at length about this, but what the heck — as shown below, WaPo and NYT are doing my "work" for me now!  For the moment, I have one question of my own to put forward: 

Why didn't CBS News' newest experts demonstrate on the air how these documents could've been created by a 1972-era typewriter? 

If you say it could have been done, then, please, wouldja just do it for us?  And then send the page your guy types up, please, to Dr. Newcomer, along with the closest-to-original version that CBS News has in its possession.  I'll volunteer to front the cost of the armed guard to escort it!

Meanwhile, Tuesday's WaPo — yes, it's the ubiquitous Michael Dobbs again, joined by Howard Kurtz — blasts CBS News with a report that its key expert from last week, handwriting analyst Marcel Matley, is backpedaling furiously:

"There's no way that I, as a document expert, can authenticate them," Marcel Matley said in a telephone interview from San Francisco. The main reason, he said, is that they are "copies" that are "far removed" from the originals.

WaPo quotes Dr. Newcomer, and nicely summarizes " at least three areas of difference that are difficult to reconcile" — word processing versus typewriter techniques, "factual problems" (e.g., Col. Staudt's retirement), and stylistic differences (non-military format and parlance).

And in what must be the fastest debunking by one MSM outlet of another MSM outlet, WaPo pulls down the trousers of CBS News' newest expert:

In its broadcast last night, CBS News produced a new expert, Bill Glennon, an information technology consultant. He said that IBM electric typewriters in use in 1972 could produce superscripts and proportional spacing similar to those used in the disputed documents.

Any argument to the contrary is "an out-and-out lie," Glennon said in a telephone interview. But Glennon said he is not a document expert, could not vouch for the memos' authenticity and only examined them online because CBS did not give him copies when asked to visit the network's offices.

Thomas Phinney, program manager for fonts for the Adobe company in Seattle, which helped to develop the modern Times New Roman font, disputed Glennon's statement to CBS. He said "fairly extensive testing" had convinced him that the fonts and formatting used in the CBS documents could not have been produced by the most sophisticated IBM typewriters in use in 1972, including the Selectric and the Executive. He said the two systems used fonts of different widths.

Talk about getting inside your opponent's analysis and decision-making loop!

It boggles my mind to see the Washington Post write:  "Questions about the CBS documents have grown to the point that they overshadow the allegations of favorable treatment toward Bush."

Meanwhile, the NYT is cultivating moles — very nervous moles — inside Black Rock:

Even inside CBS News there was deepening concern. Some of Mr. Rather's colleagues said in interviews that they were becoming increasingly anxious for him to silence the critics by proving the documents' validity and as new questions about their origin arose. Most declined to be quoted by name....

Several CBS correspondents said in interviews that such developments were making them increasingly nervous.

One network correspondent said, "I've talked to colleagues who would love to see more of a defense."

This person described the state of the staff as "deep concern, I'd say not panic - we all want it to be right." This person, echoing others, said that Mr. Rather's resoluteness in addressing the charges on the air was allaying some of the concern. "Dan really put himself on the line and I can't imagine him knowingly defending something he knew not to be the case."

A longtime correspondent said flatly, "I'm distressed."

To thoroughly mix my animal metaphors:  Gunga Dan, your fellow rats are leaving your sinking ship, my friend.  (See also Jim Geraghty's Kerry Spot, which reports that his source inside CBS said "late Monday night that some of CBS’ news talent who were campaigning for the anchor desk when Rather retires, are more than a little pleased with the recent turn of events."  Has anyone gotten Connie Chung's take on all this?)

The NYT smells the cover-up:

Alex S. Jones, director of the Shorenstein Center at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, said the burden was on CBS to prove its report was accurate beyond standard lines like "We stand by our story."

"I think they should be able to provide credible information about how these memos came into their possession," Mr. Jones said. "And if they cannot provide the name of the source, then they need to make as much transparency as possible."

But CBS News officials have made it clear that they will go only so far. They have repeatedly said they do not believe their source for the documents would go public.

One important question raised inside and outside CBS is whether it knows where the documents, which it admits are not originals but copies, came from in the first place and how many hands they passed through. Sandy Genelius, a network spokeswoman, said, "We are confident about the chain of custody; we're confident in how we secured the documents." She would not elaborate.

And — oh, the irony! — CBS News has apparently turned to pajama-wearing internet addicts to defend it (boldface mine):

Last night, CBS did not present any of the other experts who originally helped it authenticate the documents, beyond mentioning Mr. Matley, who was interviewed on the Friday broadcast. Instead it featured computer and typewriter specialists who had called or posted defenses of CBS on Internet blogs

Not content with WaPo's pantsing of CBS News' newest expert, NYT proceeds to tie his shoelaces together and then give him a big push:

Bill Glennon, a technology consultant and I.B.M. typewriter specialist who had posted his thoughts on the memos on a blog and was quoted over the weekend in publications including The New York Times, said CBS called him Monday morning. The producer asked him to come in and look at the memorandums and say whether he thought that an I.B.M. typewriter could have produced the documents. He said he was initially leery of talking. "Because quite honestly there's some people out there, they're scary," he said. "You don't agree with them, you offer opinions that don't jibe with theirs and you get a target on your back."

Mr. Glennon was in charge of service for 1,000 contracts for I.B.M. typewriters for 15 years, starting in late 1972, around the time the memorandums were produced. He spent 15 minutes with the CBS documents, he said, and believes that they could have been created using the kind of typewriters he worked with at I.B.M.

Fifteen minutes, huh?  Awesome!  I'll bet that's less time than it took you to do the routine maintenance on even a single typewriter back in 1972!  Or was your job typing up the maintenance contracts?  Mr. Glennon, don't worry about targets on your back.  Worry about the large capital L tattooed on your forehead.

Tomorrow night on the "CBS Evening News," we'll probably see Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, a/k/a Kos, who will explain again in more detail that these documents must be as genuine as Dan Rather insists that they are, because, after all, George W. Bush is a very evil man.  Case closed!

Update (Tue Sep 14 @ 5:00am):  Politicalities fisks Rather's defense.  And RatherBiased has updated its post that linked the transcript to include a list of the points Rather failed to address.  Roger L. Simon's not very impressed with the WaPo report because the "mainstream media, if the truth be told, to one degree or another, are all CBS."  Patterico rounds out my links with a post on Rather's circular reasoning.