Great article in Palm Beach Post today about the failure of the media in the SBVT controvery. Bottom line according to Mr. Hanif is that the media failed to do its job.
After weeks of covering the controversy, "the media" finally got around to covering the facts.
It took news organizations that long to advance from he-said, she-said reporting to Wednesday's unqualified dismissal by The New York Times of allegations against Sen. John Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee, by a group of President Bush's supporters calling themselves the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.
Mr. Rove, President Bush's chief political strategist, "has brilliantly judged how much and how long the media can be relied on to run with a story until it plays itself out. It doesn't matter if the revisionist Swifties are discredited as long as a touch of virus enters the voter bloodstream to flow through the veins and arteries of blogs and cable and talk radio and Op-Ed columns and contradicting ads. The war record becomes 'the disputed war record.' "
... Mr. Loomis summed up what too many news organizations took too long to conclude, and despite the reporting in the Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe and elsewhere, still won't say: "John Kerry's war record is the truth; the attack on it is a lie." The suggestion "that there are two sides to this story is Goebbels-like in its dishonesty," Mr. Loomis said, referring to Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Party's propagandist.
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/opinion/content/opinion/epaper/2004/08/29/m2e_lp_0829.html