The Not-So-Swift Mainstream Media
LAST, JONATHAN V.
The Not-So-Swift Mainstream Media And how they were forced to cover a story they hated. BY JONATHAN V. LAST DURING THE AUGUST 19 edition of PBS's NewsHour, Tom Oliphant unspooled. "The standard of...
...Without Unfit for Command, the story would never have had a focal point with readily checkable facts...
...I have been both a lawyer/law professor for two decades and a television/radio/print journalist for 15 years of those 20," Hugh Hewitt blogged...
...On television, only one broadcast network mentioned the spot: CBS spent two sentences on the "harsh" ad, in order to air John McCain's denunciation of it...
...Nothing...
...The event received scant notice by traditional media...
...On August 24, the Washington Post ran three op-eds and an editorial on the Swifties...
...Instead, James O'Shea is right...
...The Swift boat ad buys, he wrote, had "become the subject of television news shows . . . because the advertisements and [Unfit for Command] were released in August, a slow month when news outlets are hungry for any kind of news...
...There are many reasons why the mainstream media don't like the Swift boat story, but chief among them is that they've been strong-armed into covering it by the "new" media: talk-radio, cable television, and Internet blogs...
...In an article in Editor & Publisher, Alison Mitchell, the deputy national editor at the Times, admitted, "I'm not sure that in an era of no-cable television we would even have looked into [the Swift boat story...
...Sitting across from John O'Neill, coauthor of Unfit for Command and John Kerry's successor as commander of PCF-94 in Vietnam, Oliphant did a fair imitation of Al Gore—sighing, harumphing, and exhaling loudly—whenever O'Neill spoke...
...The blog JustOneMinute was the first to find the 1986 "seared— seared" speech in which Kerry described his memory of being in Cambodia in December 1968...
...Since it's published by the conservative house Regnery, Olber-mann reported, "you now bring in the whole mystical right-wing conspiracy jazz...
...It takes a great deal more intelligence and discipline to be the former than to be the latter, which is why the former usually pays a lot more than the latter...
...There are a few who served with him who dispute his record and question his leadership," Peter Jennings noted during an ABC News broadcast on July 29...
...the Boston Globe 4 times...
...Almost conclusive' doesn't cut it in the parts of journalism where I live," Oliphant lectured O'Neill, who graduated first in a class of 554 from the University of Texas Law School and clerked for U.S...
...While Olbermann and others were worrying about mystical jazz, the new media swung into action...
...The story went away for a while, but was always lurking in dark corners of the Internet, on websites like KerryHaters.blogspot.com...
...Watching the media's reaction to the Swift boat controversy, it's clear that many journalists agree with Oliphant...
...The standard of clear and convincing evidence—and it's easy when you leave out the exculpatory stuff—is what keeps this story in the tabloids," the Boston Globe columnist sputtered, "because it does not meet basic standards...
...On August 6, NBC also reported on the "harsh" ad, but only as a way of segueing into a segment on "527 groups," independent political organizations funded with soft money...
...In the New York Times, Alessandra Stanley warned that in the seedy world of cable news, "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...
...other papers expanded their coverage as well...
...John Hinderaker, one of the blog-gers behind Powerline, summed up the mood of the blogosphere by comparing journalism with brain surgery: "A bunch of amateurs, no matter how smart and enthusiastic, could never outperform professional neurosur-geons, because they lack the specialized training and experience necessary for that field," he said...
...But even here, it seemed their hearts weren't in it...
...Spurred on by the blogs, Fox led the August 9 Special Report with a Carl Cameron story on Kerry's Cambodia discrepancy...
...After Kerry, the deluge...
...According to the indefatigable Media Research Center, before Kerry went public, ABC, CBS, and NBC together had done a total of 9 stories on the Swifties...
...On MSNBC, Keith Olbermann mentioned O'Neill's forthcoming Unfit for Command...
...What can they do that we can't...
...Despite all that, however, no other medium has the reach of television, which is still the only way to move a story from a relatively small audience of news-obsessives to the general public...
...In Time magazine, Joe Klein called the whole affair "incendiary nonsense...
...It is no surprise to me, then, when lawyers/law professors like those at Powerline and Instapundit prove to be far more adept at exposing the 'Christmas-in-Cambodia' lie and other Kerry absurdities than old-school journalists...
...CBS News mentioned it briefly and tried to tie the group to Bush...
...It was a touch surreal—as it would have been if Democratic national chairman Terry McAuliffe's criticism of Bush's National Guard record had prompted the media to investigate Terry McAuliffe...
...Hugh Hewitt, Glenn Reynolds, Powerline, and other bloggers immediately began investigating the book's allegations...
...On August 8, Reynolds took his digital camera to the University of Tennessee law library and photographed the section of the Congressional Record with the Kerry speech, further verifying the chapter's central claim...
...It is perhaps impolite to note that it took the Times nearly four months to catch up with the reporting Carl Cameron did in the beginning of May...
...Two days later, Adam Nagourney paused in the middle of a news story in the New York Times to worry about how campaigns should deal with attacks "in this era when so much unsubstantiated or even false information can reach the public through so many different forums, be it blogs or Jonathan V. Last is online editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...The Washington Post and New York Times had short items about it, as did the Boston Globe...
...You haven't come within a country mile of meeting first-grade journalistic standards for accuracy...
...I don't think newspapers can be the gatekeepers any-more—to say this is wrong and we will ignore it...
...The Swift boat story first surfaced on May 4, when an op-ed by John O'Neill ran in the Wall Street Journal, in print and online, and the group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, to which O'Neill belongs, held a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C...
...All the while, traditional print and broadcast media tried hard to ignore the story—even as Kerry officially changed his position on his presence in Cambodia...
...The blogs served as fact-checkers vetting the story, at least some aspects of it, for credibility and chewing it over enough so that producers and editors who read the blogs could approach it without worrying they were being snookered by black-helicopter nuts...
...Instead, they pursued (or rather, repeated) the charge Kerry made: that Bush was behind Swift Boat Veterans for Truth...
...Yet the blogosphere has had a particular interest in taking credit for making the Swift boat story pop...
...This story" (shades of "that woman") is the story of the Swift boat veterans who have raised a number of troubling allegations against John Kerry...
...That same weekend, Al Hunt talked about the Swift boat ad on CNN's Capital Gang, calling it "some of the sleaziest lies I've ever seen in politics...
...The next night Hannity & Colmes featured members of the Swift boat group as well as veterans who supported Kerry...
...Still, the baying of the Times and the rest of the old media is a sign of capitulation...
...They also found two other instances of Kerry's talking about his Christmas in Cambodia...
...But what qualifications, exactly, does it take to be a journalist...
...And clearly the big media weren't blind to it...
...The broadcast networks did far less...
...But, curiously, they didn't try to play catch-up with the new media in ascertaining the veracity of the Swifties' claims...
...But the big news on August 6 was that Regnery allowed people to download the "Christmas in Cambodia" section of O'Neill's book...
...Analyzing how the Swift boat veterans had injected their story into the mainstream media, Adam Nagourney blamed summer...
...Supreme Court justice William Rehnquist...
...the Los Angeles Times 7 times...
...Against their will, the best-funded and most prestigious journalists in America have been forced to cover a story they want no part of—or at the very least, they've been compelled to explain why they aren't covering it...
...Over the next 11 days, an interesting dynamic took hold: Talk-radio and the blog world covered the Cambodia story obsessively...
...The most in-depth coverage came from the Fox News Channel...
...The numbers are fairly striking: Before August 19, the New York Times and Washington Post had each mentioned Swift Boat Veterans for Truth just 8 times...
...The night before, Olbermann had repeatedly referred to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth as "Swift Boat Veterans for Bush...
...The next big break for the Swifties came on August 4, with the release of their first TV ad...
...We'll hear from them in the weeks ahead," he continued, moving abruptly on to a pretaped package on Kerry's Vietnam heroism...
...On the May 4 edition of Special Report, Carl Cameron reported on the press conference, aired some of the Swifties' allegations, and then reported that certain of these veterans—Grant Hibbard and George Elliott—had previously supported John Kerry, immediately casting doubt on them...
...As the Los Angeles Times observed in an editorial, "Whether the Bush campaign is tied to the Swift boat campaign in the technical, legal sense that triggers the wrath of the campaign-spending reform law is not a very interesting question...
...Then on August 19, Kerry went public with his counter assault against Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, and suddenly the story was news...
...Now we have to say this is wrong and here is why...
...How did this happen...
...But Nagourney has it exactly backwards: Even though it was August, network television and most cable news shows stayed away from the Swift boat story for as long as they possibly could...
...They reported on border crossings during Vietnam and the differences between Swift boats and PBRs...
...As last week wore on, the coverage continued to ignore the specifics of the allegations against Kerry and began to concentrate on the dangers of the new media...
...It's unclear which of these was most critical for bringing the Swift boat story out into the open...
...Fox News covered the ad closely...
...An informal network—the new media— has arisen that has the power to push stories into the old media...
...For comparison, as of August 19 these networks had done 75 stories on the accusation that Bush had been AWOL from the National Guard...
...The combination of talk radio, a publishing house, blogs, and Fox News has given conservatives a voice independent of the old media...
...talk-show radio...
...Talk radio kept the story alive on a daily basis...
...Blogs from Instapundit to The Bel-mont Club to Powerline were reveling in the demise of the old media and heaping scorn upon professional journalists...
...James O'Shea, managing editor of the Chicago Tribune, went further: "There are too many places for people to get information...
...That same day some print media outlets covered the ad buy, but not the substance of the ad's allegations...
Vol. 9 • September 2004 • No. 48
