Posted on 10/14/2004 9:00:45 PM PDT by Nat2004
O'Neil is taking Ted Koppel apart right now and Koppel is trying to keep him from talking. this is real good.
I don't know what happened there but Druz and Rood won Bronze Stars at the same time so the Kerry Silver Star seems overblown if he landed where the one VC was and others took on the brunt of this supposed large VC army at hotter spots of battle.
Although I don't know what happened there, I don't accept the idea that these Viet Cong interviewed on nightline are reliable witnesses that should even be listened to.
Did O'Neill ask Ted about the Form 180?
Did it ever occur to Nightline to push for the release of all the U.S. NAVY'S records???
Ping to Nightline with O'Neil Now.
Koppel said: "you've had plenty of publicity in other places."
If this is not a blantant admission that the Nightline report intended to be one sided in support of Kerry, and admission of Nightline bias, then nothing is.
Koppel is shameless if he admitted this. Since when is a reporter supposed to go out and get only half the story?
Did Nightline clue in the viewers in advance that they were only going to present the other side of the story or did they intro under the pretense of objectivity. My journalism profs would have killed me if this report is as you say. Objective journalism, truely a lost art.
I agree. Nobody could interview them at the time and they are irrelevant to the medal citiation anyway. Most of them could simply have hidden the whole time. It is clear that someone shot at the Swift Boats, then the boats opened up, and some/most hid in their bunkers.
Koppel said that the local villagers, except one, had no knowledge of Kerry's Presidential campaign and therefore implied that there is no bias to their account. Nonsense! These villagers lost relatives, houses and friends. It is perfectly natural to put out a story of fierce resistance when probably they were hiding in holes. They still live in Vietnam and they better follow the party line.
I really don't understand why we should even believe those voice overs. Who knows what those people really said. The MSM has absolutely no credibility. I really don't believe anything they say anymore.
Just replaying it in my mind ( I wish I had a vcr to record the thing ) another thing that just was too convenient was the VC guy saying he or they ( VC ) were shooting at the boats but not hitting anything. The "no hits" sounds like something that he must have been made aware of at some later date.
Let me see if I get what took place tonight.
Ted would like us to believe that the peasants version of the story (30+ years after the incident...apparently they remember all these war incidents) is more believable and appropriate then John Kerry's OWN BIOGRAPHY and the words of Swift Boat Vets that were there?
Did I miss anything from what Ted would have us believe?
It's really bad when the lies ABC-Koppel produce are worse than the lies kerry produced.
Exactly right. Ted Koppel just jumped the shark and is within spitting distance of Dan Rather.
Why was it important to get all of Elian's relatives out of the country simultaneously for interviews?
Why was it important to get all of Saddam's WMD scientists and family out of Iraq for interviews?
Because they live in totalitarian countries.
Yet Ted Koppel is pissed that O'Neill wouldn't let him play a Communist-stacked deck on the "kid in a loincloth" story in silence.
Hey Ted:
Got ice?
How about "Zed Topple?"
Koppel was pathetic and petulant. O'Neill called him on using witnesses from a closed society time after time, and Koppel wouldn't address that, yet kept insisting that O'Neill address the "claims" of the family under Communist control, and complaining when O'Neill reiterated the obvious.
Ted could barely contain his rage in his final comments. I bet he kicked his Pomeranian after the show.
The guy Kerry Shot, the villagers reported, was not a local but was a reinforcement from the district. I suspect these would be more agressive because they did not live there and would have no scruples against getting the village shot up with their fire. I also believe these district VC were enforcers that kept the others in line.
Just like in this story, ABC did not get to do the interviews without a Vietnamese minder present. John Kerry has a photo of some of his Anti-War activities in a Vietnamese War Museum where he is honored for his activities as O'Neill brought up. It is clear to me that the Vietnamese want Kerry to be elected or they would never have allowed the story. They are relying on their media fifth column to this day.
Ted was trying to make O'Neill answer to the charge that the account in Unfit of the Silver Star incident didn't jibe with either the after-action report or the alleged eyewitness accounts of the North Vietnamese along the river. In dispute was the characterization of the VC soldier shot by Kerry as a "kid" (the "eyewitnesses" say he was a strong young man) and whether or not there was truly a VC ambush of the swift boats (Unfit says there was a single soldier).
In addition to calling the Nightline report "ridiculous," O'Neill retorted that the Unfit version of the events that day weren't any different than those in two friendly biographies of Kerry, one written by Boston Globe writers and the other by Douglas Brinkley, Kerry's official biographer, who had access to Kerry's diary and whatever personal notes he has heretofore made available. To make his point, O'Neill repeatedly displayed those two books, and opened to bookmarked pages that contradicted the after-action report. This annoyed Koppel to no end, but O'Neill made his point -- several times -- while Ted was stuck on trying to make O'Neill answer why he -- not all three sources of the "single VC" story, but Unfit's alone -- had trouble having faith in the peasants along the river.
I agree with O'Neill that Koppel was "had," but not by the Vietnamese as much as by the people who approached Nightline and set the whole story up.
I might be really mad at Koppel if I had the energy to be more outraged at an ABC News report tonight. This show didn't upset me nearly as much as the fluffy interview of Liam Neeson by Cynthia McFadden on Primetime Live. Neeson portrayed degenerate sex-research pioneer Alfred Kinsey in a new movie coming out this fall (written and directed by Oscar-winning writer Bill Condon, who is a homosexual). The clips from the film indicate that Kinsey is made out to be a hero, and McFadden and Neeson had themselves a wonderful time agreeing what a blessing Kinsey was, being the progenitor of the New Morality and all.
McFadden and Neeson didn't get around to the part about how Kinsey, in "researching" the sexual response of children, employed pedophiles to violate them.
Expect Dr. Judith Reisman and Dr. Laura Schlessinger to raise holy Hades.
You did a great summary write up, not just of what was said, but what the show was conveying, addressing motives and attempts to derail the viewer. Your posts of this nature are consistently top-drawer and very helpful.
It could rise to the level of, "What's the frequency, Kenneth?" And that man on the street in Texas who respectfully told Peter Jennings what he really thought of him and his "news" coverage on live TV (edited out of the West Coast edition of that night's news).
Our media still believes, or at least uses, what these people tell them to further their agenda, which at this moment is to elect John Kerry.
I remember a Koppel report during the war about how he had not seen any Iraqi tanks destroyed and with all the drama about how dubious the claims of our higher command's claims of progress were. Of course the Iraqi tanks were shot all to hell and Baghdad fell three weeks from the start, but to hear Koppel tell it we were hanging on by a thread there.
And the same old stuff for decades from these guys. They never change.
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