ABC JOINS CBS'S CRITICS
Wednesday, September 15 2004
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A rival network news organization has joined other mainstream news media to raise questions about the authenticity of documents presented last week on CBS's 60 Minutes that questioned George W. Bush's National Guard service in the early 1970s. ABC Tuesday night aired interviews with two document experts hired by CBS to examine the documents who said that they warned the network that they might be forgeries and advised it not to use them in the report. "I found five significant differences in the questioned handwriting, and I found problems with the printing itself as to whether it could have been produced by a typewriter," North Carolina-based document examiner Emily Will told ABC. She said that she sent the producer of the news feature two email messages about her concerns, one on the night before the program aired. "I told them that all the questions I was asking them on Tuesday night, they were going to be asked by hundreds of other document examiners on Thursday if they ran that story," Will said. Linda James, a Plano, TX-based document examiner hired by CBS, said that she expressed similar concerns. "I did not authenticate anything and I don't want it to be misunderstood that I did," James said. "And that's why I have come forth to talk about it because I don't want anybody to think I did authenticate these documents." Will and James later made similar comments in an interview appearing in today's (Wednesday) Washington Post. CBS later issued a statement saying that the two examiners "played a peripheral role and deferred to another expert." Meanwhile, the secretary of the man who reportedly wrote the memos told today's Dallas Morning News that she also believes the documents are fake. "They're not what I typed, and I would have typed them for him," Marian Carr Knox told the newspaper. Nevertheless, she said, the contents reflected her boss's opinions of Bush. And Dan Rather, in an interview with today's Wall Street Journal commented that the affair is a case of "those who are uncomfortable with the truth of the broadcast seeking to change the subject...raising questions about the documents because they can't deny the fundamental truths of the analysis." Bush himself spoke to the annual convention of the National Guard in Las Vegas on Tuesday but avoided any mention of the controversy. But the Republican National Committee accused the Democrats of providing the memos used in the CBS telecast.
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