Posted on 08/11/2004 7:00:47 AM PDT by veronica
Déjà vu anyone?
It all seems so familiar now. In their overt desire to reject a second term for a President Bush, the liberal media elite allows the Democratic candidate to create a legend around himself and his past. Whatever inconvenient holes or weaknesses there are in his personal history are whitewashed out. When the Democrat's critics challenge these legends, only then is it time to travel beyond the mythology and launch into investigative journalism — but only to expose the cynical conspiracies of the partisan plotters against the Democrat.
This entire cycle, which recalls 1992 and then repeats in every other year of the Clinton era, is now coming around again with the ad and book campaign of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. In Clinton-era terms, it could echo the Paula Jones case. Like Jones, the vets held a press conference (at the National Press Club in early May) that most national media outlets strenuously ignored. So months later, they created another splash to draw the media out, only to be sharply criticized.
But the better Clinton-era comparison for the swift-boat veterans are the Arkansas state troopers. Obviously, Vietnam was no walk through a Little Rock nightclub. But these men know Kerry, as the troopers knew Clinton. They say they are eyewitnesses to some moments that do not match the much-seen flattering filmstrips of his wartime experiences. It is the very possibility of their persuasive power that causes Democratic-media apparatchiks to decide they must be discredited. Their motives for lying were the primary focus, and reporters rarely sought to confirm the negative stories, preferring to leave them unsubstantiated and uncirculated.
Why would the media approach the swift-boat vets opposing Kerry by completely changing the subject instead of engaging the battle on the turf of Kerry's record? If they're so confident Kerry is unassailable and the vets are politically daft, why not demand Kerry's records to shut it down? Here again you can see the Clinton parallels. Behind the pro-Democrat bravado is a real lack of confidence in what a careful evaluation of the public record will show. They change the subject to motivations and personal attacks because merely raising the subject, the question of whether Kerry served or protested honorably and without great political calculation is a loser for Democrats. If the portrait of Kerry tips even a bit from jut-jawed hero to unreliable ally in a crisis, a self-promoter with presidential ambitions in the most trying situations, Kerry's chances with veterans and military families may be quite hampered.
If conservatives were slow to see Clinton parallels, the media liberals were not. MSNBC's Keith Olbermann noted that the new Swift Boat veterans book comes "from Regnery Press, which is supported in some way by Richard Mellon Scaife of the Pittsburgh Tribune Review, and you now bring in the whole mystical right-wing conspiracy jazz." Keith doesn't feel he has to have any proof of Scaife-prints on Regnery or the veterans, just a vague but vivid belief in harmonic conservative convergence.
Wall Street Journal pundit Al Hunt denounced the effort in the classic Washington way: When you don't want to assess whether an attack is true or false, just say that asking the question is crappy politics. "Suppose in the 1992 presidential election, after an unconfirmed rumor surfaced about an alleged affair then President Bush had years earlier, Clinton supporters decided to make marital fidelity a central issue. That would be almost as crazy as the current effort by some Bush backers to focus attention on John Kerry's Vietnam War record and subsequent protests." For Hunt and others, the calculus is easy: Bush ducked, Kerry fought. What Kerry did while fighting or protesting is "beyond the pale" of public discussion.
Conservatives and liberals can debate whether the veterans charging Kerry is "Unfit for Command" are a boon or a bane to Bush. But the news media is supposed to operate on a different plane with a different formula. What is the true and full biography of a man who wants to be president? They're supposed to investigate, and then report if the substance of the charges is true or false. Instead, the media act with extreme political calculation at the risk of their own reputation for fair play — just as they did in the Clinton years.
On NBC, the swift-boat-vet ad isn't a new frontier for investigative journalism, but an undesirable outbreak of free speech that should have been prevented by law. Tom Brokaw asked Friday night: "Up next, NBC News 'In Depth' tonight: The latest campaign ad from an independent political group. Harsh attacks. Are these ads totally out of control?" Could he telegraph any more blatantly that he wished this ad did not exist, or that he would have liked to control it right into the dumpster?
He later explained: "NBC's Andrea Mitchell tells us tonight, the campaign-finance law supposed to fix the system left this very big loophole." The network stars have discovered that "527" groups, which the Democrats have built willy-nilly to defeat President Bush, have suddenly become undesirable. So we should ask: Is Tom Brokaw out of control? Aren't he and his fellow reporters one giant "loophole" in our campaign speech system?
The mere fact that we're at this embryonic stage of Kerry's biography in August shows the lack of media vigilance about Kerry's resume. If anyone would question the timing of the current Swift Boat vets campaign, they are correct. They could have started in May at the National Press Club. They could have started in February, when Terry McAuliffe and the Democrats drew two weeks of meticulous network pounding of George W. Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard. (For example, take CBS's John Roberts on February 12: "Officials hoped the release of Mr. Bush's dental records would end the matter, but the dentist who treated him has no specific recollection of seeing the future president.")
But they should have been exploring this story on their own in January, when Kerry broke out of the Democratic pack through powerful and repeated war heroism stories. Since Sen. Kerry began putting his Vietnam experience into biographical overdrive before the Iowa caucuses, it might have seemed like an obvious task for reporters to assess Kerry's service in greater detail. But they did not. They are more interested in electing Kerry than telling us about him.
— Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and an NRO contributor.
day 3- no word on whether he was in cambodia and why he lied and what else he has lied about
not good for the dims
To some extent, Bush is to blame for some of this.
CFR concentrates even more power into the hands of the liberal media and groups like MoveOn.Org.
Bush signed CFR into law, calculating that the SCotUS would strike it down. They didn't.
He should have stood up for his principles and vetoed it.
My new tag line!
All conservatives should boycott the liberal media.
Good post, Veronica. And your home page is first-class.
Thanks!
All AMERICANS should boycott the liberal media and then pray, because there is something very frightening about media controlling, filtering and distorting news to enhance a specific candidate that is running for President in a free country. Republican or Democrat should understand that this is a dangerous precedent.
I have heard some static that a Kerry spokesman has stated that Kerry misspoke about Cambodia. But they did scrub the Kerry website of the docs indicating he was there. So it just ges to say!
"Kerry wasn't in Cambodia before he was in Cambodia."
The press is definitely operating by two different standards. With Bush, they questioned evey little move he made with the national Guard, sought out records, interviewed olc cronies, etc. With Kerry, even asking questions about his record - a record which he himself brought to the fore and exploited - is considered beyond the pale, dirty politics, etc.
Damn, three typos in three sentences - when am I going to learn to read my comments before posting?
(Excerpts of) Kerry's record speaks for itself.
It's not going to matter..
This is run out the clock for the Dems, it's the fourth quarter and Friday is 0.00 on the clock.
All they have to do is get to Friday and the story is buried under the Olympic coverage.
If they try and resurrect it after the Olympics it will dealt with as "old news" by the MSM as though all the questions have already been answered.
"All AMERICANS should boycott the liberal media and then pray, because there is something very frightening about media controlling, filtering and distorting news to enhance a specific candidate that is running for President in a free country. Republican or Democrat should understand that this is a dangerous precedent."
The liberal media has become a part of entertainment rather than as an effective information gathering and reporting tool. Such as with, they are now a business and as such ccan be ignored by a potential buyer, in this case the administration.
Knowing this, it is the right of the administration to omit certain media groups from interviews and press conferences since the "press" is no longer an objective reporting tool. Their bias ,in and of itself, is enough to have the administration tell ABCNBCCBSCNNMSNBC to go pound sand and have only a Fox reporter who will report fair and balanced coverage as a pool reporter.
The liberal bias is prevelant enough that a Supreme Court battle as far as the medias Constitutional right to freedom of the press can wind up favoring the administration.
And that my friends, is how you change the media. That and not to buy any products of the advertisers.
"All AMERICANS should boycott the liberal media and then pray, because there is something very frightening about media controlling, filtering and distorting news to enhance a specific candidate that is running for President in a free country. Republican or Democrat should understand that this is a dangerous precedent."
The liberal media has become a part of entertainment rather than as an effective information gathering and reporting tool. Such as with, they are now a business and as such ccan be ignored by a potential buyer, in this case the administration.
Knowing this, it is the right of the administration to omit certain media groups from interviews and press conferences since the "press" is no longer an objective reporting tool. Their bias ,in and of itself, is enough to have the administration tell ABCNBCCBSCNNMSNBC to go pound sand and have only a Fox reporter who will report fair and balanced coverage as a pool reporter.
The liberal bias is prevelant enough that a Supreme Court battle as far as the medias Constitutional right to freedom of the press can wind up favoring the administration.
And that my friends, is how you change the media. That and not to buy any products of the advertisers.
Bump!
You know - that would be absolutely devastating for a news media outlet...And you wouldn't have to do it to all of them.
Just target one - say the worst offender, CNN - and bar them from all press conferences and executive branch property.
The message would be heard clearly and understood.
Totally agree. When they bitch about freedom of the press you can tell them that they are not the press, but a liberal attack machine that is being used to influence people.
Make them defend it.
Kerry's own website has "Secret Mission in Cambodia"
Posted on 08/11/2004 9:46:45 AM CDT by slowhand520
On kerry's own website he has the article that talks about that "secret mission" in Cambodia:
http://www.johnkerry.com/pressroom/news/news_2003_0601.html
Paragraph close to the bottom
Second issue. A FR last night said that all boats in the military has a log. Who can go out there and find the log for Kerry's boat? It must be kept by the senior officer in charge. This must be available from the military records.
Who can find it?? It will make for good reading.
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