You Can Report, but We Will Decide (The conservative media's bias

[papau]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-wasserstein24aug24.story

You Can Report, but We Will Decide
The conservative media's handling of the Swift boat dispute is a case study in bias.
By Ben Wasserstein
Ben Wasserstein is a writer in New York.

August 24, 2004

Last Thursday, the Washington Post reported that the military records of Larry Thurlow, one of John Kerry's major accusers among the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, contradicted Thurlow's version of events and confirmed Kerry's. At the very least, this cast severe doubt on the charge that Kerry fabricated the events that earned him one of his Vietnam War medals.

The conservative media had been pushing the fabrication story energetically. How did it deal with this new evidence undermining it? As it turns out, at almost every turn it soft-pedaled the new evidence or outright ignored it, showing its bias throughout.

On March 13, 1969, Kerry commanded one of five Navy Swift boats in a raid up the Bay Hap River and won a Bronze Star for actions under enemy fire. Thurlow commanded one of the other boats, and he has claimed in constant media rounds that there was no enemy fire. But, as the Post reported, Thurlow also won a Bronze Star that day, and the citation that accompanied it referred to "enemy small arms and automatic weapons fire" directed at "all units."

Thurlow's current story casts doubt on his own Bronze Star as much as Kerry's. Thurlow's explanation is that his citation's record of the events must have been based on Kerry's and that the information must have been provided by Kerry himself. There is an "after-action report" that Thurlow and John E. O'Neill, coauthor of the anti-Kerry book "Unfit for Command," refer to as "Kerry's report" despite the fact that it bears the initials KJW. (Later news stories have pointed out that Thurlow's Bronze Star citation refers to a witness to the enemy fire — Thurlow's crewmate, Robert Lambert — and that the KJW initials are also on reports about events Kerry was not involved in.)

No one has so far challenged the Washington Post's facts. Not that you'd know that if you were watching or listening to or reading conservative media outlets. Rupert Murdoch's New York Post ran Thurlow's charge that Kerry lied to get his medal. On Friday, the day after the Washington Post story poked a hole in that contention, the New York Post ran a teeny story focusing only on Kerry's decision to counterattack against a "tough anti-Kerry TV ad." The Wall Street Journal editorial page and its website, OpinionJournal, also said nothing about the new evidence.

The conservative Washington Times did report the Post's Thurlow scoop in a news article. It also ran Part 3 of its series excerpting the book "Unfit for Command," and the excerpt on Friday included Thurlow's contention that there was no hostile fire on March 13, 1969. In his column on Kerry, Washington Times Editor in Chief Wesley Pruden wrote, "The monsieur's friends at The Washington Post attempted to muddy the waters for him yesterday," and then Pruden approvingly restated Thurlow's assertions and his explanation for the discrepancy. An unsigned editorial called on the media to investigate the after-action report.

The leading serious conservative journal, the Weekly Standard, posted a new issue online Friday with a cover story titled "The Kerry Wars." The story cited the Washington Post article and admitted that "the documentary evidence available so far backs Kerry's story," but its paragraph dealing with the accusations that Kerry lied to get his medals concludes that "such claims boil down to Kerry's word versus his opponents'." That ignores the witnesses who back Kerry's story. It also ignores the pesky documentary evidence that supports Kerry's version of events.

On TV and radio, all the action came Thursday. On the Fox News Channel, the afternoon news show, "Studio B With Shepard Smith," offered a three-minute report on the "ongoing spat" over Kerry's military record without mentioning the new evidence about Thurlow's contradictions. The imbroglio over Kerry's Vietnam record led "The Big Story With John Gibson" and, again, not once in the five-minute segment was the Thurlow discrepancy discussed. <snip>

[joefree1]

1. Duh

Thanks for posting this. It's up to us DUers, bloggers, political artist (like me), and comedians to get the story out.

Back to work.


Download the free bumper art here:
http://ediablo.com/eDiabloGallery.html

[dmr]

2. Editors Grapple With How to Cover Swift Boat Controversy

Editors Grapple With How to Cover Swift Boat Controversy
By Joe Strupp

Published: August 24, 2004 12:01 AM EST

NEW YORK As the John Kerry swift boat controversy navigates itself from the shoreline of the 2004 presidential campaign into the mainstream, newspapers face a dilemma of how to report on the attacks against the Democratic nominee without giving them undue credibility or blowing the issue out of proportion.

Alison Mitchell, deputy national editor for The New York Times (Click for QuikCap), points to the changing media landscape and its impact on what newspapers choose to cover. "I'm not sure that in an era of no-cable television we would even have looked into it," she said. Near the top of a front-page article on Tuesday, the Times referred to the "mostly unsubstantiated accusations" of Kerry's swift boat critics.

But Washington Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. said newspapers can still drive their own agenda. "I don't think we are lessening at all our judgment of the news," he told E&P. "There is much more media, but we still judge for ourselves which facts we report in The Washington Post."

- snip -

On Monday, Michael Tomaskey, writing for The American Prospect's Web site, took issue with Downie's decision: "The Washington Post should not even be running such a story ... in the first place. Len Downie and the paper's other editors would undoubtedly argue that the story represents the Post's tenacity for getting to the truth, without fear or favor. But what the story actually proves is that a bunch of liars who have in the past contradicted their own current statements can, if their lies are outrageous enough and if they have enough money, control the media agenda and get even the most respected media outlets in the country to focus on picayune 'truths' while missing the larger story."

More ...

On Cable, a Fog of Words About Kerry's War Record
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY

Published: August 24, 2004


There is the fog of war and then there is the fog of cable.

Over the last few weeks, 24-hour news networks have done little to find out what John Kerry did in Vietnam, but they have provided a different kind of public service: their examination of his war record in Vietnam illustrates once again just how perfunctory and confusing cable news coverage can be. Facts, half-truths and passionately tendentious opinions get tumbled together on screen like laundry in an industrial dryer - without the softeners of fact-checking or reflection.

Somehow, on all-cable news stations - CNN as well as Fox News - a story that rises or falls on basic and mostly verifiable facts blurs into just another developing news sensation alongside the latest Utah kidnapping or the Scott Peterson murder trial. (It is particularly confusing on Fox News, where so many of its blond female anchors look like Amber Frey.)

Fox News, which delivers its news with "Fight Club" ferocity, has relished the controversy the most, seizing hungrily on charges that Mr. Kerry lied to gain his medals. Those accusations, which have not been substantiated, were made in the book "Unfit for Command," co-written by a former Swift boat commander and longtime Kerry critic, John O'Neill. Fox News has pushed the story early, often, and sometimes even late.

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[dmr]

3. Bush Quote: I was not prepared to shoot my eardrum

http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=8388
Cowards All Around
The media should take a step back and remind us what Bush and Cheney were up to in 1969.

By Michael Tomasky
Web Exclusive: 08.23.04

At first blush, the treatment given to Michael Dobbs' page-one swift-boat article in Sunday's Washington Post seems at least vaguely reassuring. There's the neutral headline "Swift Boat Accounts Incomplete," but below that, a deck-headline informing readers that "Critics Fail to Disprove Kerry's Version of Vietnam War Episode." The banner treatment, running across three-fourths of the front page above the fold, places the onus of proof where it belongs -- on the accusers, not on Kerry, a point that Bob Novak and others have chosen to ignore, obscure, or even refute; and in announcing that the proof isn't there, it seems to be a plus for Kerry.

So what's wrong with this picture? This: The Washington Post should not even be running such a story -- a takeout of something in the neighborhood of 2,700 words, I'm guessing, delving into the remotest arcana about what really happened on the Bay Hap River on March 13, 1969 -- in the first place. Len Downie and the paper's other editors would undoubtedly argue that the story represents the Post's tenacity for getting to the truth, without fear or favor. But what the story actually proves is that a bunch of liars who have in the past contradicted their own current statements can, if their lies are outrageous enough and if they have enough money, control the media agenda and get even the most respected media outlets in the country to focus on picayune "truths" while missing the larger story.

And the larger story here is clear: John Kerry volunteered for the Navy, volunteered to go to Vietnam, and then, when he was sitting around Cam Ranh Bay bored with nothing to do, requested the most dangerous duty a Naval officer could be given. He saved a man's life. He risked his own every time he went up into the Mekong Delta. He did more than his country asked. In fact he didn't even wait for his country to ask.

George W. Bush spent those same years in a state of dissolution at Yale, and would go on, as we know, to plot how to get out of going to Southeast Asia. On that subject, here's a choice quote. "I was not prepared to shoot my eardrum out with a shotgun in order to get a deferment," Bush told the Dallas Morning News in 1990. "Nor was I willing to go to Canada. So I chose to better myself by learning how to fly airplanes."
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[PROGRESSIVE1]

4. At least the LA Times points this out.