The funny part is that Dan Rather and his producers were fooled by a deeply unconvincing fake — a supposedly Vietnam-era typewritten document that was obviously made using Microsoft Word using default settings. Furthermore, many many people continued to defend it as real for a long time after partisans on the other side had thoroughly debunked it.

If 2004 news could be fooled by a fake that took a couple of minutes to make, I’m not that worried that today’s news is any better.