Reading Between The Lies
Terrific Matt Welch article in Reason on dissecting the truth from the political propaganda -- a responsibility the mainstream media tends to ignore:
"Never, in the best part of two decades, have I had to reject, throw away or send back for rewrite so many letters filled with so many frauds and character assassinations," wrote Tim White, editorial page editor of the Fayetteville, North Carolina, Observer, in an exasperated August 15 column. "I have as much respect for the attacks of the Swift Boat Veterans as I have for the barrages of Whoopi Goldberg and Michael Moore. None."The reaction is tempting but wrong. Michael Moore, sloppy and propagandistic though he is, packages hundreds of facts in his polemic entertainments; he also bellows crucial populist oxygen into perfectly legitimate topics such as the cozy relationship between the Bush dynasty and the vile House of Saud. The Swift Boat Veterans, even while kicking off their campaign with an advertisement that centrist Slate columnist Jacob Weisberg decribed as "pack[ing] an impressive amount of deceit into 60 seconds," helped unearth one interesting and potentially important bit of real news: that John Kerry was not in Cambodia on Christmas of 1968, as he had claimed at least four times (on the floor of the U.S. Senate, among other places).
...In an unintentionally hilarious "9-point checklist" for "Swift Boat genre" stories, Aly Colon, "ethics group leader" of the hand-wringing Poynter Institute, wrote that the first four questions a newspaper should ask in such a situation are: "Whoís making the accusation/allegation? Why now? To whom are they connected? Where does the accuserís funding come from?" All four just happen make the Swift Boat Veterans look sketchy. Colon left out a question that might be more pertinent: "Is it true?"
I fully realize this diatribe was meant as a bop on the head of various Kerry critics, but those last few questions of who's making the accusation, why now, to whom are they connected, and who's funding the accuser...maybe this diatraber could put this in a memo and send it over to Mr. Rather, too. Looking sketchy knows no boundaries. Thank goodness for spinsanity and the ass fact checkers now appearing at your local blog cafe.
allan at October 13, 2004 6:06 PM