[Paleopsych] Widsom of crowds

[Lynn D. Johnson, Ph.D.]

Here is an interesting example of the wisdom of crowds, in today's 
Opinion Journal, by John Fund:
http://www.opinionjournal.com/diary/?id=110005611

The energy of the internet to solve difficult problems (oil, space) has 
not yet been effectively tapped. There may be great ways to do it.

I'd Rather Be Blogging
CBS stonewalls as "guys in pajamas" uncover a fraud.

Monday, September 13, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT

A watershed media moment occurred Friday on Fox News Channel, when 
Jonathan Klein, a former executive vice president of CBS News who 
oversaw "60 Minutes," debated Stephen Hayes, a writer for The Weekly 
Standard, on the documents CBS used to raise questions about George W. 
Bush's Vietnam-era National Guard service.

Mr. Klein dismissed the bloggers who are raising questions about the 
authenticity of the memos: "You couldn't have a starker contrast between 
the multiple layers of check and balances [at '60 Minutes'] and a guy 
sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing."

He will regret that snide disparagement of the bloggers, many of whom 
are skilled lawyers or have backgrounds in military intelligence or 
typeface design. A growing number of design and document experts say 
they are certain or almost certain the memos on which CBS relied are 
forgeries.

Mr. Klein didn't directly address the mounting objections to CBS's 
story. He fell back on what high school debaters call the appeal to 
authority, implying that the reputation of "60 Minutes" should be enough 
to dissolve doubts without the network sharing its methods with other 
journalists and experts. He told Fox's Tony Snow that the "60 Minutes" 
team is "the most careful news organization, certainly on television." 
He said that Mary Mapes, the producer of the story, was "a crack 
journalist" who had broken the Abu Ghraib prison abuse story.

But leaning on reputations does nothing to dispel the doubts raised by 
bloggers, experts and relatives and associates of the late Lt. Gen. 
Jerry Killian, the memos' putative author. Gary Killian, Gen. Killian's 
son, says CBS apparently didn't call several people he suggested they 
contact who would have contradicted the CBS story. Bobby Hodges, a 
former Texas Air National Guard general whom "60 Minutes" claimed had 
authenticated the memos, says that when he was read them over the phone 
he assumed they were handwritten and wasn't told that CBS didn't have 
the originals. He now says he doesn't believe the memos are genuine.

Hugh Hewitt, the unofficial historian of the blogging movement, says 
that "bloggers have been overwhelmed with e-mails from active-duty and 
retired military who scoff at the form of the memos." They point out the 
man cited in the memo as pressuring Mr. Killian to "sugar coat" the Bush 
military record had left the Texas Air National Guard a year and a half 
before the memo was supposedly written. In addition, typewriters with 
perfect centering ability were nonexistent in 1972 and 1973, and 
National Guard regulations barred the maintenance of such records. Mr. 
Killian's widow adds that her late husband kept no personal files from 
his Guard duty, notes that CBS won't reveal its source, and says the 
memos are bogus. Earl Lively, director of operations for the Texas Air 
National Guard in the 1970s, told the Washington Times that the memos 
are "forged as hell."

CBS's fallback defense is that its story was only partly based on the 
documents and points to its on-camera interview with former Texas House 
speaker and lieutenant governor Ben Barnes, who claimed that he pulled 
strings to gain a place for Mr. Bush in the National Guard. But Mr. 
Barnes is clearly unreliable. The New York Times reported last February 
that an unnamed former Texas official--later revealed to be Mr. 
Barnes--was telling reporters he had interceded on behalf of Mr. Bush 
but that his story "was subject to change, and there were no documents 
to support his claims."

Indeed, Mr. Barnes's own daughter says her father's story can't be 
trusted. Amy Barnes Stites called a talk radio show Thursday to report 
that her father had told her a different version in 2000, when Mr. Bush 
first ran for president. "I love my father very much, but he's doing 
this for purely political reasons," she said. "He is a big Kerry 
fund-raiser and he is writing a book also. And the [Bush story] is what 
he's leading the book off with. . . . denied this to me in 2000 that he 
did get Bush out (of Vietnam). Now he's saying he did." When hostess 
Monica Crowley asked Ms. Stites if she believed her father had lied in 
his interview on "60 Minutes," she replied "Yes, I do. I absolutely do."

"60 Minutes" may have a sterling reputation in journalism, but it has 
been burned before by forged documents. In 1997 it broadcast a report 
alleging that U.S. Customs Service inspectors looked the other way as 
drugs crossed the Mexican border at San Diego. The story's prize exhibit 
was a memo from Rudy Comacho, head of the San Diego customs office, 
ordering that vehicles belonging to one trucking company should be given 
special leniency in crossing the border. The memo was given to "60 
Minutes" by Mike Horner, a former customs inspector who had left the 
service five years earlier. When asked by CBS for additional proof, he 
sent another copy with an official stamp on it.

CBS did not interview Mr. Camacho for its story. "It was horrible for 
him," says Bill Anthony, at the time head of public affairs for the 
Customs Service. "For 18 months, internal affairs and the Secret Service 
had him under a cloud while they established that Horner had forged the 
document out of bitterness over how he'd been treated." In 2000, Mr. 
Horner admitted he forged the memo "for media exposure" and was 
sentenced to 10 months in federal prison. "Mr. Camacho's reputation was 
tarnished significantly," Judge Judith Keep noted.

Mr. Camacho sued CBS and eventually settled for an undisclosed sum. In 
1999 Leslie Stahl read an apology on the air: "We have concluded we were 
deceived, and ultimately, so were you, the viewers."

If it turns out that the Killian memos are indeed forgeries, the 
Internet will have played an invaluable role in exposing the fraud much 
faster than the 18 months Mr. Camacho had to twist in the wind. Free 
Republic, a Web bulletin board, raised early warning signals about the 
memos within hours of last Wednesday's "60 Minutes" broadcast. 
Powerlineblog.com, a site run by three lawyers, reposted those comments, 
which were amplified by indcjournal.com. Then design expert Charles 
Johnson, who blogs at littlegreenfootballs.com, retyped one of the memos 
using Microsoft Word and showed them to be a perfect typographic match. 
A defensive Dan Rather went on the air Friday to complain of what he 
called a "counterattack" from "partisan political operatives." In 
reality, traditional journalism now has a new set of watchdogs in the 
"blogosphere." In the words of blogger Mickey Kaus, they can trade 
information and publicize it "fast enough to have real-world 
consequences." Sure, blogs can be transmission belts for errors, vicious 
gossip and last-minute disinformation efforts. But they can also correct 
themselves almost instantaneously--in sharp contrast with CBS's 
stonewalling.
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