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Media Pushes Fictions over Facts By Robin Boyd Posted On September 27, 2004 @ 09:58 PM EST [Post Comment] The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were the focus for crucial weeks of the 2004 Presidential Campaign. Day after day, Democrats decried the use of “partisan money” to fund the Swifties’ ads, calling on President Bush to denounce the partisan attack against John Kerry. John Edwards called on the President to stop hiding behind what he called a “front group.” The media’s search for Bush/Cheney connections to the Swift Boat vets was also relentless, and it is a study in media...

SERIOUS LEGAL QUESTIONS ABOUND RELATING TO COORDINATION BETWEEN 527'S AND PENNSYLVANIA KERRY/EDWARDS CAMPAIGN HARRISBURG, Pa., Sept. 30 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Republican State Committee Chairman Alan Novak called the apparent coordination between Governor Rendell, the State Democratic Party and ultra-liberal 527 groups seriously troubling and questioned their actions under Federal Election Commission Campaign Finance laws. "Governor Ed Rendell is running the grassroots operation and get-out-the- vote effort of the Democratic Party and the Pennsylvania Kerry/Edwards team through 527 soft-money groups such as Americans Coming Together," stated Novak. "He has some serious questions to answer." In a letter dated September 20, 2004,...

As he described it, Bill Burkett was sick of the Kerry campaign's sheer ineptitude. A member of the Progressive Populist Caucus of the Texas Democratic Party and a retired Army National Guardsman, he became incensed as he watched his candidate's credibility suffer from TV ads sponsored by Swift Boat veterans, while Kerry and his staff bungled their responses. Burkett wanted to do something about it, and believed he had the means to do it. But Kerry's people weren't listening. In an Internet posting, he candidly wrote that he waded through "seven layers of bureaucratic kids trying to get a job...

The source of a discredited CBS News report said Thursday that he did not coordinate the release of disputed documents with John Kerry's campaign. Bill Burkett, a former Texas National Guardsman, also said that he warned the network that the documents critical of President Bush's service in the National Guard would be vigorously challenged and should be independently validated. "It caught CBS very flat-footed. They were not prepared. And I had warned them ... that this would probably be one of the most highly coordinated vicious attacks that they would ever have to face," Burkett said in an interview with...

<p>AP: Lockhart admits to calling phony memo source Burkett at CBS producer Mary Mapes' behest three days before show aired Details to come......</p>

As co-hosts of CNN's "Crossfire," Paul Begala and James Carville have made no secret of being partisan Democrats -- not that they could, since both men were high-profile strategists for Bill Clinton. But as informal advisers to John Kerry's campaign, do they now face a serious conflict? Some of their cable rivals think so. "If me and Dick Morris signed on to the Bush campaign tomorrow, the press would go crazy," Fox's Bill O'Reilly told viewers, adding: "CNN, they are not being honest by keeping those two guys on." MSNBC's Keith Olbermann wrote on the network's Web site: "You can't...

I was watching Inside Politics on CNN. A new 527 ad from "Mothers Opposing Bush" had a BS commercial against Bush. I checked out the websight and saw a direct endorsement of Kerry. Isn't that illegal? I thought 527's cannot specifically endorse a candidate.