re: #47 Charles Johnson

You know, Dan Rather might still be at CBS if he had climbed down immediately and admitted he made a mistake. He created a whole lot of grief for himself.

I’ll admit up front that I’m not 100% in the “forged document” camp - it’s closer to about 60%, mostly due to due-diligence issues that I had with the way CBS handled the story. They were far, far too quick to jump the gun to scoop everyone else in my opinion.

I’m mentioning this because I was a teen (and a hardcore computer geek) during the 1970s and in the two years’ worth of typing classes I took (specifically because of before-mentioned geekdom), our Junior High and High schools used IBM Selectric and Executive typewriters for their typing classes, and one thing that I do distinctly remember is the proportional-spacing features they employed.
The reason our classes used those versus the cheaper Royal or Brother typewriters was simple - they were as durable as hell, and standard typewriters tended to break - a lot - under the stress that fat-fingererd 14 and 15-year-olds are typical for subjecting to various devices.

Personally, I am of the opinion that if someone wanted to generate a believable fake document, especially at a news organization like CBS, it would have been trivial to find a suitable typewriter in one of their storage rooms.