Kurtz on Zell: Truth and Consequences

[kskiska]

(lots of links to other good articles, too)

NEW YORK -- What should the press do when a convention speaker stands up and hurls charges that are somewhere between exaggerated and false?

It's a party gathering, after all, and red-meat rhetoric is always on the menu. "Our opponents will take the economy into the toilet, fail to protect America and bore everyone to death for the next four years." That sort of thing. You get plenty of political license.

But isn't it part of the journalistic mission to provide a reality check?

(snip)

But there is also the content of the charges he was hurling at Democrats:

"In their warped way of thinking, America is the problem, not the solution. They don't believe there's any real danger in the world except that which America brings upon itself through our clumsy and misguided foreign policy."

Really? Didn't Clinton send troops to Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo? Didn't most Democrats vote to support the Iraq war?

"Senator Kerry has made it clear that he would use military force only if approved by the United Nations."

Yes, Kerry did say that -- to the Harvard Crimson back in 1971. He's long since repudiated the remark.

lots more…
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/nation/columns/kurtzhoward/