Has Anyone Read "To Set The Record Straight"?

M

mountainclmbr

New member
Has anyone read this book and is it worth the purchase?

http://www.tosettherecordstraight.com/index.php?topic=Excerpts

Foreword by John O'Neill


Swift Vet spokesman John O'Neill kindly provided the Foreword for To Set The Record Straight.
Chapter List

CHAPTER 1 Hanoi's American Allies
CHAPTER 2 Voices in the Wilderness
CHAPTER 3 Gunning Down the Senators
CHAPTER 4 Investigating the Winter Soldiers
CHAPTER 5 Boxes in the Attic
CHAPTER 6 Launching the Swift Vets
CHAPTER 7 Developing a Tap Code
CHAPTER 8 The Perfect Political Storm
CHAPTER 9 An Unforgettable Cambodian Christmas
CHAPTER 10 An Incident on the Bay Hap River
CHAPTER 11 On the Air, Under Fire
CHAPTER 12 Blogs and Rumors of Blogs
CHAPTER 13 Rather's Ruin and the Rise of the Pajamahadeen
CHAPTER 14 Kerry Lied, While Good Men Died
CHAPTER 15 Steve Pitkin's Long Journey Home
CHAPTER 16 Myths, Wounds, and Honor
CHAPTER 17 November 2 Is Veterans' Day
CHAPTER 18 Aftermath

Free Chapter Download

We weren't sure which chapter to make available online, but Dan Rather solved that problem. In his $70 million lawsuit against CBS News, Captain Dan insists that the forged National Guard documents that ended his career as a network anchor were genuine. He also charges CBS executives with conspiring with shadowy figures in the Bush Administration to make Rather the fall guy for the fiasco. Seriously.
For the real story, read CHAPTER 13: Rather's Ruin and the Rise of the Pajamahadeen.
Click to expand...

I followed the story on Free Republic on the Dan Rather forged memos and how Free Republic members ID'd them immediately as forgeries. The story spread like wildfire through the BLOGS and resulted in Rather and some of his associates losing their jobs. That chapter was fascinating and is available for free download here:

http://www.tosettherecordstraight.com/docs/CH13.pdf

About time to get the popcorn ready and settle into the comfy chair for this next election.
 
mountainclmbr said:
The story spread like wildfire through the BLOGS
Click to expand...

This is the crux of your debate to me.

I enjoy coming here, and there are many individuals who are TFL members who treat me like a friend. My suspicion wonders if we would be friends and pals off the boards. Would we target shoot together, would I even trust them.

And to be honest, I would never believe anything I read on a blog, not one scrap. I don't know if it's researched, and I don't know if the author was drunk and angered at 2:00AM.

Now believe this or not, I get into trouble with my brothers--and I don't mean the children of my parents. I mean my fellow club members. And there is a code of behavior. And truth be told, sometimes I feel I didn't get a fair shake, despite bi-laws. Humans are involved, not automatons.

Same deal here. If TSR wrote in his blog that RP was a cross-dresser and thereby lost a vote, I would discard the statement until it could be proven.

And that puts guys like me at a true disadvantage. Since younger guys are more familiar with computers (I just learned how to post pics about four months ago) that means everything I read in cyber-space I pretty much discard.

How do I prove your statement? If I cannot--or do not trust it--I will discard the entire argument.

As I have told you, I'm a fourteen year old female high school cheerleader who portrays an old biker on forums.

You don't know any differently until you check trusted sources.
 
Tourist,

I agree with you about checking sources and information. In this case it was demonstrated that CBS was not checking sources and were caught by some pretty smart people on the internet. CBS did not fire Dan Rather for nothing.
 
You have no more assurance that a big mainstream media outlet is putting out facts than you do with a blog. Sometimes, less assurance, because they are banking on that their reputation will cause them not to be questioned. With any media, you have to check multiple sources.
 
Maybe I'm wrong, but I though Dan Rather was a scapegoat. He gave the report, but the information was given to him by other employees of CBS. He didn't back check those sources, and deserves some fault for that, but he was not the only one at fault. Isn't he sueing CBS over this?
 
I think Dan is suing CBS for $70M. Mary Mapes and several others were also fired. Even after the documents were shown to be false, Dan defended them and then finally said it did not matter if they were true because it was just extraneous evidence in a story that was still true. All the coordination with the Kerry campaign makes it pretty fishy.
 
The documents were never "proven" to be false.
There is serious doubt as to their authenticity.
The problem for Rather was that he could not prove that the documents were authentic.
If there is a level of proof that journalists abide by (and I doubt that there is) then Dan Rather didn't meet it.

What bugs me about the whole deal is that we're talking about a few documents out of hundreds. The rest of the documents, including ones released by the Bush administration, demonstrate what we already knew.
George Bush got out of the war because his daddy and grand daddy had pull. While in the guard he didn't show up when he was required to do so.
 
mountainclmbr said:
I agree with you about checking sources and information...CBS was not checking sources
Click to expand...

You have just demonstrated my problem in searching out info.

"A group of non-informed guys wrote in an unresearched blog their undocumented commenarty on a non-informed news provider who hired an unreliable talking head who deliberately broadcast misinformation for an undisclosed agenda."

And my cousins get jailed for lying under oath...

This is your thread MTR, I'd like to hear your side of a debate on the thread you started, and why this struck you as newsworthy.

BTW, I learned a really great cheer today, but Betty-Lynn says she saw it on Hannah Montana, the cow. Ever see her in that moldy sweater she wears all of the time, like puddles of fat...
 
Tourist,

It is not my obligation to prove the memos false. It is pretty hard to prove a negative although everything points to them being false. CBS was investigating this for years and this was the best they had. It was CBS news and Dan Rather's duty to validate the authenticity of the memos. The memos matched the format of memos from the 1990's, not the 1970's. I will never know the truth, but I sure know what it looks like Dan Rather was trying to do.

These memos are exact duplicates of Microsoft Word with default settings using Times New Roman 12pt font. The text is proportionally spaced, used in typesetting or word processors, not typewriters since the typewriter does not know how to space for what you will type next or how to space entire rows of text.

The memos are dated 1973, Microsoft Word was first released in 1983.

I just posted because I just saw today that this book was released and that John Kerry is reported to be coming out with new information prior to the election. I am waiting to see which gets more coverage in the press, but I think I can guess.

I am a pretty big Bush critic on some of his handling of the presedency so I don't mean to make apologies for him. It is just that I find the bias in the mainstream media to be so blatent.

I am also a registered libertarian and I am disappointed with many Republican positions.

I just saw this book was published today. I would like to know if it is worth buying. Has anyone read it and was it any good?
 
mountainclmbr said:
Tourist, It is not my obligation to prove the memos false. It is pretty hard to prove a negative although everything points to them being false.
Click to expand...

Oh, no disagreement there. The problem is that as the election nears snippets and scoops are about to slide out like chitterlings on a greased kill floor.

Everyone has a spin. My SIL is so disenchanted with domestic reporting she only listens to the BBC. And I don't blame her.

Even if you could somehow document the memos, some attorney would christen them "work product" and turn the 'fact' to a full 180.

You remember Kerry's famous line, "Yes, of course I voted for it, right before I voted against it."

I might be synical, but when a politician or aide or spin doctor moves his lips, I simply figure he's lying. If he produces a "confidential written source" I believe it's a dummy from photo-shop. If two congressional rivals finally pose in a photo for evening news, I am assured that both are blackmailing the other with video from his opposition's mistress.

I cried for JFK. I don't really give a tinker's damn about the current crop. That's an inside joke, I currently work as a tinker.
 
Bloggers wer the ones who first found that the CBS documents were forgeries by the simple task of reproducing them in Word for Windows. They found that the documents recreated 100%, right down to the margins, the default template in Word and they posted them for the world to see. I believe the first to do so was "littlegreenfootballs". It is hard to have a document that was formatted in a media which did not even exist at the time of the supposed writing.

It was a blogger who discovered the fallacies in the "hockey stick" theory of global warming. The "hockey stick" has now been soundly debunked.

It was that same blogger who discovered errors in the temperature recordings which had shown 1998 to be the hottest year on record -- one of the hallmarks in Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth". That discovery led to the fact that it was actually 1934. The record has now been officially changed.

Just because someone is not a "professional" journalist does not mean that they should be discredited.
 
I think some of you are missing the point. A news anchor used his influence and position to try to effect the outcome of a presidential election. They all do it on a daily basis, of course, but in more subtle ways. Dan's problem was that it was too obvious and made them look bad, confirming many people's suspicions. That hurts their bottom line so he had to pay the price.
 
jimpeel said:
It was a blogger who discovered the fallacies
Click to expand...

I don't believe anyone here who is critical of internet veracity is claiming that all blogs and bloggers are spreading lies.

What we are saying is that a reasonable man doesn't read anything--and definitely in cyber-space--unless there is a avenue to document the claims.

For every blogger who is trying to tell an honest story there are literally millions of trolls and outright posers who make the internet a sea of kids using mom's computer in their dank basement bedrooms.

You know as well as I do that during the hour or so I spend over a morning latte' I could easily create a website, a My Space or what appears to be a legitimate site where I actually am a teenage female cheerleader, using photo-shop and out-right lies.

We also seem to be jumping on Dan Rather--and for that singular story we should. Frankly, I always thought he was too much the self-promoter. But, unlike a Rambo movie, Rather really went to Vietnam, and he didn't have to. There are scores of media people who die in combat zones, and don't have to.

I intend to research claims made on the internet. I don't know about you, but I've been smeared, and I ain't hiding.

If you can tell one lie and tens of millions believe it just by signing on, then that media ought to be investigated to death.
 
What we are saying is that a reasonable man doesn't read anything--and definitely in cyber-space--unless there is a avenue to document the claims.
Click to expand...

The problem is when 80-90% of news reporters identify themselves as voting for the "D" candidate for president and a signifigant percentage of those have what I would call "far left" belief systems. The mainstream news ends up being biased to the left. I am sure some of the bias is unintentional, but I spot what must be intentional bias all the time. Just look at the difference in how presidential candidates are treated by the (usually left leaning) moderators.

With all the debate about separation of church and state you would think that there would be just as much debate about separation of media and state. The problem is that there is no one willing to report on that kind of issue. If the House, Senate and President are all controlled by Democrats then I expect that the "Fairness Doctrine" will be enacted to eliminate all criticism.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top