It's September 11th today.

For the record, before I started posting about ligatures and memos, I did check the news. No terrorist attacks. So far, so good.

Are we giving bin Laden what he wanted by fighting the "War on Terrorism" as a war? Perhaps. Is there a better course of action for the US to follow? I don't see one.

The interesting thing about the memo story is not so much the memos but what the story shows about the media and its responses.

Let me give a quick summary of the events, with approximate times. On Wednesday, September 8 at 8-9 PM Eastern time, 60 Minutes II airs the segment, including the memos. At 11:59 PM, the first known allegation that the memos are forgeries is raised. The next morning, Powerlineblog and Little Green Footballs (among many others) take up the story. Meanwhile, print media runs stories based on the CBS report, and the White House responds (11:53 AM). Note that the print media and the White House are still going with the memos as genuine, even though around noon Thursday, both Instapundit and National Review are running reports that the memos may be forgeries.

Friday morning, the print media runs stories that the memos may be forged, including stories by the Washington Post and Boston Globe. Friday evening, Rather gives an interview to CNN, reiterating his questions and maintaining that the documents are authentic.

Saturday morning, the Boston Globe runs a story titled Authenticity Backed on Bush Documents.

So what does it mean? My analysis is, the Wednesday night and Thursday morning press activity ran according to normal media schedule: CBS knew what story it was going to tell on Wednesday night and provided them to other media organizations on that day. Thursday, the forgery story came up from nowhere, and everybody -- both sides of the partisan media -- scrambled to present breaking news. You could even call it real news in the sense that it was new information to everyone involved. By Friday, the news machine was back on track with Rather's response; this is borne out by the Saturday stories which follow a more normal storyline.

This is, as many others have said, an unprecedented success for blogs. Blogs created a news story and forced all the other media to scramble and react in real time. But it was only one story in one only news area (domestic political) and it took the entire blogosphere to do it.

The other interesting conclusion is that it is in general true that media people know more, and know it sooner than non-media people. But this advantage is artificial, created by the need to write copy, set type, print newspapers, put on makeup, record segments, and make fixed news deadlines. Instant online publication really does kill the news cycle just like everyone said it would.

Incidentally, here's Kevin Drum (a Democrat) urging caution until the memos can be more thoroughly vetted. I do not mean to say that this is a purely partisan issue, and Drum is an example of a Democratic partisan who is willing to entertain the idea that the memos may be forged.

I haven't seen anyone looking into this so far, so I'll go into more detail. Traditionally, when setting type, some pairs or groups letters could be fit together so tightly that new type blocks were created for their combinations. These letter-combination blocks are called ligatures; here is a technical reference which contains some nice blowups of Quickdraw font ligatures.

Several of the memos contain letter-groups that could be represented by ligatures. For example, this memo contains the word "officer" which contains "ffi", and this memo contains the word "from" two times, and "fr" is a ligature.

True Type fonts (such as Times New Roman) contain special ligature glyphs and substitution tables (OpenType specification, via microsoft (link will probably die within 3 years)) which indicate when a ligature glyph should be used instead of a sequence of other glyphs. (Actually, there's a quite general glyph substitution table, so much more than that can be done.)

The only way to get true ligatures from a cold-type typewriter (ball, daisy, or otherwise) is to have a separate ligature glyph. I don't know if such glyphs existed on 1970s-era balls, but I rather doubt it. The much-discussed IBM Composer system does not seem to have done ligatures.

And for good reason: in order to insert a ligature glyph instead of multiple letter glyphs, you have to know what the surrounding letters are. Ligatures require context-sensitive typesetting, while separate-character insertion (even up to and including kerning) only require context-free typesetting. Context requires memory, and that's something none of these typesetting machines or typewriters had.

So: do the CBS memos contain ligatures? Were ligature glyphs available on IBM Selectric balls? Did the IBM Composer system support ligatures? These questions could also be answered easily enough.

UPDATE: Immediately after writing this, I found a discussion of ligatures in the comments to this post

I don't have anything substantive to add to the discussion of the memos presented on 60 Minutes II on Wednesday.

To me, it seems obvious on the face of it that the documents which CBS presented as authentic memos from 1972 and 1973 were produced on modern word-processing software. Charles Johnson has demonstrated that typing the text of the memos into a default modern installation of Microsoft Word yields exactly the same document as the one which is claimed to be from 1973. Same font, same leading, same ligature "fr", same line breaks in the ragged-right justification. Although it was possible at that time to create beautifully typeset documents, the equipment necessary to do so was uncommon and even if it was available to a Lieutenant Colonel of reserves (effectively, a middle-to-upper-level manager), it's extremely unlikely that he would have both known how to operate it, and chosen to do so in order to create a "CYA" (cover your *ss) memo.

So when I'm obliged to choose between the two hypotheses -- one, that the memo was created in Word, and two, that an Air Force light bird used fancy typesetting equipment to set up a memo to file, I'm forced to choose number one.

But CBS News is not arguing that it was possible that Killian produced the memos himself -- they're claiming that it actually happened. They would get a lot more traction by admitting that the memos they presented were retyped into Word because the original memos would have been too hard to read. Instead they stand by the authenticity of documents which were obviously produced in Word.

The only explanation I have for this -- suggested to me by a friend -- is that we need to recognize that CBS News is not in the news business. It is in the entertainment business, with the goal of attracting viewers. They're certainly succeeding at that. I'm tempted to watch CBS news, just to see what dumb sh*t they'll come out with next.

But if they are in the entertainment business, you might ask, why then do they pretend to be objective journalists, concerned with the practice of journalism? That's their schtick. TV news is an entertainment medium where people like Dan Rather play at being serious journalists and commentators.

And it is, after all, entertaining.