The MSM continues to carry water for their candidate.

[dude1394]

I guess since the NYTimes, WaPo, ABC,CBS,NBC have decided that kerry's military record is now more sacred than the dead sea scrolls, it will take the rest of the media to force their hands.

media whitewash

Kopel: Kerry's Cambodia troubles ignored

Denver dailies assail candidate's foes but cold-shoulder the issues they raise

August 14, 2004

Newsweek's assistant managing editor Evan Thomas, "There's one other base here, the media. Let's talk a little media bias here. The media, I think, wants Kerry to win and I think they're going to portray Kerry and Edwards . . . as being young and dynamic and optimistic and there's going to be this glow about them . . ." (Inside Washington television show, July 10).

Thomas' prediction is amply supported by the (non)coverage which the Denver dailies, like most of the rest of the media, have given to this week's meltdown of the Kerry campaign.

As reported in The Congressional Record, on March 27, 1986, Sen. John Kerry spoke on the Senate floor against U.S. support for the anti-communist contras in Nicaragua:

"I remember Christmas of 1968 sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia. I remember what it was like to be shot at by Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge and Cambodians, and have the president of the United States telling the American people that I was not there; the troops were not in Cambodia. I have that memory which is seared - seared - in me . . ."

Likewise, Kerry wrote an Oct. 14, 1979, letter to the editor of the Boston Herald: "I remember spending Christmas Eve of 1968 five miles across the Cambodian border being shot at by our South Vietnamese allies who were drunk and celebrating Christmas. The absurdity of almost being killed by our own allies in a country in which President Nixon claimed there were no American troops was very real."

He repeated the Cambodia Christmas story in Senate committee hearings in June 1992 and September 1997.

Actually, in December 1968, the president of the United States was Lyndon Johnson, not Richard Nixon. Nixon's statement that there were "no American combat troops in Cambodia" was made in November 1971.

All available evidence indicates that Kerry was lying about Christmas in Cambodia.

As detailed in the new book Unfit for Command, every officer in Kerry's chain of command denies that Kerry's Swift boat came within 50 miles of Cambodia. Three crewmen on Kerry's boat have denied that they ever went into Cambodia. (The other two refused to be interviewed.)

In Douglas Brinkley's Kerry biography, Tour of Duty, Kerry told Brinkley that he spent Christmas Eve 1968 "near the Cambodian border" in the town of Sa Dec. Sa Dec is in the center of South Vietnam and 50 miles from Cambodia.

The New York Daily News, the New York Post, The Washington Times, and the London Telegraph all covered the Christmas in Cambodia story early this week, but Colorado's Rocky Mountain News and Denver Post have failed to do so.

In Colorado, the Cambodia fraud has been covered in depth on the Hugh Hewitt Show, a national radio program broadcast on KNUS-AM (710) from 4-7 p.m. weekdays. Hewitt interviewed Steve Gardner, who served on Kerry's boat for two of the four months that Kerry spent in Vietnam, from November 1968 through January 1969. Gardner maintains that the boat never came within 50 miles of Cambodia. You can read the interview at: hughhewitt.com/index.htm# postid766.

The Denver dailies have covered the story exclusively by attacking Swift Boat Veterans for Truth through:

• An Associated Press article in both papers reporting that John McCain denounced the attacks on Kerry (without providing any evidence that the attacks are factually wrong);

• News columnist Mike Litt- win criticizing Bush for not criticizing the Swift boat veterans (Aug. 7);

• The Post's Jim Spencer defending Kerry's Purple Hearts (a July 30 column with more substance than other Kerry defenses); and

• An AP article pointing out that John Corsi, the co-author of Unfit for Command has made disparaging remarks about Islam and Catholicism (News, Aug. 11).

Early in the week, the Kerry campaign denied that Kerry had ever claimed to have spent Christmas in Cambodia. Confronted with evidence, the campaign refused to answer questions. On Wednesday, the campaign abandoned the Christmas-in-Cambodia story that had been "seared" in Kerry's memory. The campaign told Fox News that Kerry was in Cambodia sometime, but would not specify when. The campaign told ABC News that Kerry was in the Mekong Delta, which "consists of the border between Cambodia and Vietnam, so on Christmas Eve in 1968, he was in fact on patrol."

To the contrary, the Mekong River flows from Cambodia into Vietnam and does not border the two countries; the Mekong Delta is adjacent to the Pacific Ocean, and is nowhere near Cambodia.

The News ignored the story of Kerry retracting three decades of Christmas-in-Cambodia tales. The Post also ignored the story, and instead ran the attack on John Corsi which had appeared the day before in the News.

It is as if the media had covered the Bush National Guard story only by impugning Bush's critics, while barely acknowledging the substance of the charges. Evan Thomas was right.

[dude1394]

Shorter Chris Matthews

Chris Matthews had a segment with John O'Neill of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and John Hurley of the (objective and non-partisan) Vietnam Veterans for John Kerry. As a service to my readers, I will save you the trouble of laboring through the transcript. Here we go:

Chris Matthews: I didn't go to Vietnam. George Bush didn't go to Vietnam. John Kerry showed a lot of courage going to Vietam, and anyone who disagrees is a lying, partisan weasel.

John O'Neil: Well, lots of men, including John Kerry, showed courage by going to Vietnam. However, to win a Silver Star requires an extraordinary display of courage...

John Hurley: You're a partisan, lying weasel funded by Republicans.

Repeat for twenty minutes.

[dude1394]

becoming unbelievable

Fascinating

It increasingly appears that one of the few of the fellow vets who have been publicly supporting John Kerry may never have served with him at all.

The media blackout on Kerry's Vietnam record is really quite stunning. I've never seen anything quite like this. We know for a fact that 80-90% of working reporters and editors vote Democratic in every election, but this is simply unreal. As John Rosenberg notes, even so respectably mainstream-left a paper as the Washington Post, on its front page no less, is continuing to gush about Kerry's fantastic Vietnam record and the support of his fellow veterans, while saying not one word about any of the Swifties' allegations or the recently uncovered evidence of Kerry's possibly false claims about Cambodia. Or about a man who served on his boat saying he's a liar and a sleaze.

The Post didn't put the gushy praise-sans-criticism in an editorial either. It was there as front page news.

I would have to ask why a single 20 year old drunk driving charge made screaming national headlines four years ago, but none of this is making it into the mainstream press, except on the editorial pages of a few small newspapers.

I am honestly stunned. This isn't bias. This is... it's... I don't even know the word for it.

It's obviously not a conspiracy, and people who think it is one should take off their tinfoil hats. But what do you call it? Groupthink? Mass delusion? Blind spot? You cannot gush praise at a guy's military record and then just ignore the fact that he has heavy duty critics. Even if all of those critics were right-wing Republicans, that doesn't make it less of a story.

Especially when the ad has such a huge impact on independent voters. And when the Democratic National Committee and the Kerry campaign are trying to sue the Swift Boat Vets into silence. That's not news?

What the heck is going on here?

By the way, if you want to feel really conspiratorial, ask yourself what the heck's going on at Amazon.

[dude1394]

The "Reader's Representative" at the Kansas City Star explains why they had been slow to cover the story of Kerry's Vietnam service. It's all the fault of the big wire services.

Some of you think the paper isn't doing its job of covering Sen. John Kerry and the controversy surrounding his military record.

Last week, readers called and wrote in, saying The Star hasn't covered critics' assertions that:

1) Kerry's claim of being in Cambodia on Christmas of 1968 was a lie; and that

2) One of the swift boat veterans says he was misquoted by the Boston Globe, and is still fully behind the anti-Kerry movement.

True, The Star hadn't published either of these news items as of Friday. By Friday afternoon however, the paper corrected itself and assigned a reporter to write the story. It ran Saturday.

Why the delay? The answer has to do with credibility. The Star had been waiting for credible sources to move stories over the news wire, which is how most of the news about national politics gets in the paper. When these sources were slow to act, editors felt they had to.

Star editors point out that last week they asked national news wires to provide stories about statements from Kerry and the swift boat veterans. “We are sensitive to the need to address this,” said Darryl Levings, national editor at The Star.

The only criticism here might be that editors waited too long to act. How long is too long? It's a difficult question to answer, and the fact that editors recognized the need for the story and assigned the task is laudable. Readers should also be praised for voicing concerns about the lack of a story.

The Star subscribes to several news wire services — the aforementioned credible sources — including Knight Ridder (The Star's parent company), The Associated Press, and the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and The Washington Post wire services.

On Friday, a Google News search turned up dozens of references to the Kerry stories. Many of them were on fringe news and personal Internet pages, sites that The Star and other mainstream media don't recognize as credible by themselves. Such news must be verified, preferably with two independent sources. That doesn't always happen on Internet sites, talk radio and cable TV news shows — even though such electronic media often are far ahead of other traditional news media in reporting controversy.

Sometimes the early reports do get it right. When that happens, traditional news media look like slowpokes. As with other celebrity and political news stories, electronic media frequently move faster than print news does. That's because they don't always have the system of checks and balances newspapers require.

So, how long can the wire services ignore this story. It seems that Knight Ridder is catching up. Perhaps the rest will follow along. (Thanks to Mike who sent in the link to this story.)

[LRB]

Face Dude most of those controllling the major news outletts want Kerry to win and covering stories that make Kerry look bad would not work towards that end. The only saving grace at all is they have to make at least a token attempt at being nonpartial in their coverage to have any hope at all of retaining even the smallest shred of credibility. However IMO that credibility is only with the extremely naive or the extremely liberal.

[dude1394]

Agree but I fear that something important is being broken here. I'm happy that the blogosphere and the internet has enabled the smaller papers to get the stories out. As the Kansas City star states above they've relied on the wire services of the latime, nytimes, washington post, knight ridder, ap. And they are being white-washed and not given the news as it is coming out.

But it's not a good thing to see those organizations lose this type of credibility. Hopefully new sources "knight-ridder" for example can pick up the mantle that fox has picked up to provide something outside of the msm.

Addendum:
I'm sure I will get a few "you have to be kidding right" but, it's because integrity is very hard to regain once lost. And the NYTimes, WashingtonPost need to have integrity, without it we get more michael moores, james carvilles, al gores being portrayed as mainstream when they are part of a lunatic fringe. If the DNC can't distance themselves from that fringe and the media supports it, the repubulicans will have no choice but to match that fringe (ultimately) unless it is completely discredited.