Parsing Farce
In Romenesko letters, David Kiley bitch-slaps broadcast journalists for sound-biting the facts instead of adequately explaining them:

(Chris) Matthews is as lazy as most other broadcast journalists who have for months repeated a shorthand version of John Kerryís Iraq position this way: "First, he voted for the war and then he voted against the funding for it." I donít recall the RNC complaining that this shortchanged Kerryís position. Am I the only journalist in America who thinks broadcast journalists of every alleged political stripe have short-changed Kerry on this by eliminating the context and details of the votes. I never needed any tortured clarification of these votes. He voted to authorize the President to invade Iraq. He did not VOTE FOR WAR. There is a difference. But figures like Matthews and NBCís Tim Russert, as well as the predictable righty pundits, have continually called it "voting for the war." His vote against the $87 billion was very clearly a vote against how the spending was to be funded (adding to the deficit and not out of a rolled back tax cut) and because of the sweetheart contract to Halliburton. It was a protest vote. Yes, I know this is Kerry position. But itís valid, and it deserves to be represented each and every time a non-partisan moderator brings it up. I don't expect Sean Hannity to voice the context. But I do expect it of Russert, Matthews, Greenfield, etc. To not do so is to merely carry water for the RNC and B-C campaign. The excuse not to, I imagine, is that it would take an additional eight to ten seconds of explanation. And broadcasters canít be bothered with "wasted" seconds. Shep Smith, after all, keeps his pencil sharp to eliminate verbs from his copy. Just because a position can"t be put on a bumper sticker doesn"t give broadcast journalists or commentators a pass to only give as much time to explaining an issue as they would to reading a bumper-sticker.

Second: The most distressing aspect of this campaign is the sound-bite battleground. Everyone from the RNC to Tim Russert is in such a heated frenzy to get the "gotcha" contradictory sound-bite that context is lost more often than it is not. If I spent two weeks researching Bushís sound-bites and strung them together like the Bush campaign does I could make GWB look like a gun hating, same-sex marriage loving, Texas BBQ hating, quiche eating candidate. But such a portrayal wouldnít be accurate. Neither is it accurate to help paint Kerry as a flip flopper (a word right out of the Rove campaign that has been embraced by journalists writing about the campaign) because he voted for the $87 billion in committee but against it on a floor vote. If I were an editor overseeing political coverage, I wouldnít allow the term "flip-flopper" to be used in objective copy as a descriptor unless it was in a quote that was on point. The Bush campaign chooses a buzz-word, "flip-flopper," so journalists start accepting it in their lexicon like it was a "Sopranos" reference?