(Note: “The Power of the Jump”™ is a semi-regular feature of this site, documenting examples of the Los Angeles Times’s use of its back pages to hide information that its editors don’t want you to see.)

Yesterday, Justin Levine noted my complaint that the L.A. Times had not run a front-page story on the question of whether the CBS documents were forgeries — despite running a front-page story based on the documents the day before.

Justin suggested the possibility that

the L.A. Times is simply moving in a deliberately slow fashion in “nailing down this story to the satisfaction of their high journalistic standards”. This way they can report details about the controversy on a Saturday when nobody reads the paper and just so happens to coincide with the 9/11 Anniversary which would bury the story again anyway. At the L.A. Times, their style of journalism is just like comedy – timing is everything.

Justin turned out to be exactly right. The Times’s front-page story ran today: Saturday, September 11.

Okay, I’ll give the editors credit — sort of — for finally putting the story on the front page, where it belongs. Why “sort of”? Because, in addition to the suspicious timing, the Times turns out to have no actual room on the front page for a single one of the damning details demonstrating that CBS’s documents were probably forged. Incredibly, no variant of the word “forgery” appears anywhere in the entire piece — and the front page contains no hint that the documents may not be authentic.

Here are the details:

The Times story is titled Amid Skepticism, CBS Sticks to Bush Guard Story. After a quick and unexplained allusion to a “growing cloud of skepticism,” the rest of the material on the front page is devoted to following up on the theme of the headline: CBS worked hard on the story and is standing by it.

Here’s what appears on the front page:

A CBS News report that suggested President Bush did not fulfill his military commitment 30 years ago fell under a growing cloud of skepticism Friday. But Democrats insisted that they had plenty of evidence to continue their campaign to show that Bush got breaks that other young men did not during the Vietnam War.

The controversy over the television report prompted CBS Evening News’ Dan Rather to issue an unusually long and detailed response Friday evening. The veteran anchor said that the network stood by its original report: that Bush got favored treatment to win a coveted spot in the Texas Air National Guard and then failed to meet performance standards once he was admitted.

Rather said in an interview that CBS worked exhaustively on the story, beginning before the 2000 presidential election.

“We worked hard, we worked long, we dug hard and did our best to be accurate, to authenticate what we could,” Rather said. “This story is true, the

[See Guard, Page A18]

and here the story jumps to, ironically enough, page A18 — the paper’s page of choice for evidence showing the documents are forgeries.

Note that there is nothing on the front page to explain what might have created the “growing cloud of skepticism.” Nor is there even a hint that the documents CBS presented on “60 Minutes” might be forged. What this means is that the L.A. Times still has not said on its front page that the “60 Minutes” documents might be forgeries.

All of the evidence that the documents are forged comes on the back pages. This is very significant, because (as an L.A. Times reporter has told me) studies show that most readers don’t bother to follow a front-page story to the back pages.

What’s more, before the paper gets to that evidence, it gives the by-now familiar warning: “The debate was fueled by conservative Internet sites and radio talk-show programs.” As I have told you previously, the Times uses this as “code language telling readers that the allegations need not be taken seriously.”

Now that readers are in the right frame of mind to be skeptical — that is, what few readers have bothered to turn to page A18 — the paper finally reveals these tidbits:

• “[S]everal experts questioned the authenticity of critical memos purportedly written by the man who commanded Bush’s squadron in 1972 and 1973.”

• “A retired Guard major general [Maj. Gen. Bobby W. Hodges] — who Rather said in an interview would corroborate the CBS account — instead told The Times that he believed the memos from the late Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian were not real.” Moreover, Maj. Gen. Hodges also “said that he could not recall any conversations in which Killian had complained about Bush’s performance or about the fact that Bush failed in August 1972 to take a physical exam, removing him from flight status.”

• Killian’s “widow and son said they believed the documents were fakes and couldn’t imagine the former squadron leader criticizing Bush.” And the son, Gary Killian, “said CBS had ignored his warnings that the memos were not real.”

• A CBS expert who had supposedly authenticated all four documents turned out to have authenticated only one — apparently based primarily (or entirely) on his conclusion that the document had an authentic signature:

  As another of the corroborating experts for its report, CBS and Rather presented an on-air interview with Marcel B. Matley, a San Francisco document examiner. Rather said Matley had corroborated the four Killian memos.

  But in an interview with The Times, the analyst said he had only judged a May 4, 1972, memo — in which Killian ordered Bush to take his physical — to be authentic.

  He said he did not form a judgment on the three other disputed memos because they only included Killian’s initials and he did not have validated samples of the officer’s initials to use for comparison.

  Ouch.

(By the way, a truly enterprising reporter might have learned another interesting detail about Matley: he has previously claimed that it is not possible to do what he did for CBS. As the Power Line blog has revealed, Matley has previously said that “a definite finding of authenticity for a signature is not possible from a photocopy” — yet photocopies are exactly what he examined for CBS.)

These details form the most damning bill of particulars against a media outlet that I have seen since the Jayson Blair scandal at the New York Times. And not a single one makes it onto the front page of the L.A. Times.

Yup. Justin Levine called it.

UPDATE: Tom Maguire notes another major deficiency in the Times’s coverage. I address those here.