Old News, Long Overdo(Is absolutely everything fair game for the press..?)

[papau]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16835-2004Sep12.html


Old News, Long Overdo
Vietnam-Era Rumors Dig In for the Duration

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 13, 2004; Page C01

Is absolutely everything fair game for the press these days?

From the contours of John Kerry's war wounds to George Bush's failure to take a National Guard physical to a book's disputed allegations of drug use at Camp David, the media seem consumed these days with excavating the down-and-dirty past.

All too often the details are murky, the evidence secondhand, the documents doubted, the arguments driven by high-decibel partisanship.

"I don't think the media feel badly anymore covering 30-year-old wars or personal scandals," says Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia political scientist and press critic. "I don't think they feel particularly badly about publishing gossip and unproven allegations." Although there's an argument that what the candidates did during Vietnam "is revealing of Bush's character and Kerry's character, it's not nearly as important as what they've done in their public lives in the last 20 years."

If journalists devoted the same investigative energy to the candidates' efforts to bolster Medicare and Social Security or deal with the mess in Iraq -- as opposed to precisely what happened on the Bay Hap River in 1969 -- perhaps more people might find campaign coverage compelling. <snip>