EVEN IN his more hallucinatory moments, I doubt that Andy Warhol could have imagined that a man named John Newcomer would have fulfilled the artist’s prediction of 15 minutes of fame.
For years Mr Newcomer has toiled quietly away in the field of typography. He is the author of such bestsellers as Win32 Programming and Developing Windows NT Device Drivers. Given half a chance he will tell you more than you ever wanted to know about kerning, justification, and IBM selectronics. Until this week Mr Newcomer has pursued his harmless fetish mostly in the privacy of his own consulting business in Pittsburgh. But then came Rathergate, which burst upon the American presidential election with the full force of Hurricane Ivan this week.
Dan Rather is one of the most famous faces in American public life. The host of the CBS Evening News for what seems like a hundred years (he took over from the iconic Walter Cronkite), Mr Rather is the face of traditional TV news. He is famous for ratherisms — folksy similes that sound as if they could have been written by Raymond Chandler on crack. On election night 2000, he told his viewers: “This race is about as hard to call as a deaf hog up a sassafras tree.” But despite this good ol’ boy, tell-it-like-it-is southern ingenuousness, Mr Rather is a pet hate figure for conservatives. They regard him, with some justification, as an avatar of self-appointed, elitist, left-wing media bias.
Last week Mr Rather fronted a CBS news show that contained some explosive allegations about President Bush’s less than impressive stint in the Texas Air National Guard in 1971-72. The programme featured documents from the early 1970s purportedly typewritten by Jerry Killian, Mr Bush’s commanding officer in the Guard. These papers said the man who would later be Commander-in-Chief had ignored an order to report for duty, and that the Guard had sought to “sugarcoat” his record before, in effect, dismissing him from service.
This was powerful stuff. Though most Americans were familiar with the general storyline that the young Mr Bush was a playboy who used his family connections to avoid active duty in Vietnam, and then sat out the war downing highballs in Alabama bar rooms, the allegation that he had ignored orders was something quite different.
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But doubts about the authenticity of the documents were quickly raised. Eagle-eyed conservatives took to the internet to exchange observations about their validity. The consensus was that they looked oddly modern.
Enter Mr Newcomer. Along with the three other people in the world qualified to talk about 1970s typewriter technology, Mr Newcomer delivered his damning verdict with a lengthy analysis on his own website and in dozens of media interviews. First, the script was Times New Roman (forgive the plug), a text not generally available until word processors came into general usage in the 1980s. Among other arcana, there was the little problem of monospacing versus proportional spacing. Before PCs, typewriters produced script with uniform spacing between the letters. Only modern word processors could produce text where the spaces between letters were adjusted to fit more neatly. The CBS documents were, ominously, proportionally spaced. And then the coup de grâce. The text on the documents contained superscripts — the slightly raised numeric suffix — 117th, for example. It was almost impossible to produce such superscripts on an old typewriter.
The documents looked like forgeries, said Mr Newcomer, who is emphatically not a Bush supporter, a 2004 American version of the Zinoviev letter, a crude attempt to smear the President. I normally object to the journalistic tendency to capitalise every scandal big or small by adding the name “gate” to the principal subject. But Rathergate is too good to miss.
As of yesterday, Mr Rather was still standing by his story, but it was steadily crumbling under the weight of Mr Newcomer’s evidence. The political implications are unclear; though it has probably helped Mr Bush that so much public attention has been diverted from the bad headlines in Iraq.
There will be those who scoff at the apparent lunacy that a presidential campaign should turn on such minutiae. It might seem odd that this campaign continues to hinge on what the two candidates did 30 years or more ago and whether news organisations have misrepresented it. But there is an enormously consequential point in Rathergate. If CBS and Mr Rather are disgraced, as looks likely, it will be the most remarkable example yet of the collapse from unassail able authority of the old elite purveyors of news. Last year, Howell Raines, the Editor of The New York Times, had to resign after assiduous critics used the internet to reveal how he had wrongly and bullyingly defended a reporter’s lengthy fraud on the paper’s readers.
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In the past the traditional news machines in New York could purvey their world view — generally elitist left-leaning and arrogant — to their readers and viewers without much challenge. If Mr Rather said something, Americans had not much choice but to accept it. With the growth of alternatives to the TV news and especially with the internet, American news is much more open to examination and challenge.
This ought to be a global phenomenon. Greg Dyke’s departure from the BBC in similar circumstances this year suggests that it might be so. But it is striking that it was government intervention and a judicial inquiry and not individuals with personal computers that brought down the BBC. Not for the first time, the world could learn a lot from the dynamic American democracy.
gerard.baker@thetimes.co.uk
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