The Discerning Texan
All that is necessary for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing.
-- Edmund Burke
-- Edmund Burke
Saturday, October 30, 2004
Cheering from the Press Box
When a large mainstream daily like the Chicago Tribune runs an op/ed that notices the extent that the press is going all out for Kerry, there is obviously a lot of fire where all the smoke is coming from:
The story rocked America's presidential campaign when The New York Times broke it Monday: "Huge Cache of Explosives Vanished From Site in Iraq." Within a day, Sen. John Kerry's campaign had a new ad that depicted the Times' story and said President Bush "failed to secure" the explosives after the U.S.-led invasion last year.That reminded us of an old bromide in the news business: Beware the damning story that breaks in the final days before an election. Chances are it didn't surface then by accident.
On Tuesday, syndicated columnist Linda Chavez faulted her colleagues in the news media for not investigating "truly startling evidence unearthed this week that the Communist Party may have been directing John Kerry's anti-war activities in the early 1970s." As proof, Chavez cited captured communist records now held by the Vietnam Center at Texas Tech University.Wow! Loose weapons and commie puppeteers! Life wasn't this scary when (you choose) Ronald Reagan/Bill Clinton was in charge.
Late-breaking mud, often stirred to a sticky thickness by partisan leakers of news tips, is a staple of presidential campaigns. This year, though, a mudslide of charges is oozing into print and broadcast reports. It has tended to reinforce the perception among some Americans that many journalists are rooting for Kerry.
No, we're not going to skip down that path holding hands with Rush Limbaugh. But it's harder to refute those suspicions when CBS, which reported the weapons story cooperatively with the Times, acknowledges that it originally planned to break the scoop on "60 Minutes" this Sunday--two days before the election.
Had that occurred, many voters wouldn't have had time to learn about Monday's follow-up report from NBC, which had a reporter embedded with U.S. troops who arrived at the weapons site in question one day after the fall of Baghdad--and who didn't observe those 380 tons of high explosives. Could Saddam Hussein have moved his stockpile? Nor would many voters have learned two points that add crucial perspective: first, that 400,000 tons of Hussein's munitions have been captured or destroyed by coalition troops, and second, that the recent Duelfer report on Iraqi arms puts the number of Hussein's weapons caches at more than 10,000. The bottom line: It's not yet clear that the explosives were even present when U.S. troops arrived.
I think the Tribune’s admonition to “beware the damning story that breaks in the final days before the election” is advice well heeded. But there is a difference between the NYT/CBS hit job and the Linda Chavez piece they compared: the mainstream media ran with the NYT story on every network. And meanwhile the Chavez piece was buried by the very same media outlets.
The Tribune aren’t the only ones alarmed: check out this piece on the “Media disgrace” in this election by Thomas Sowell.
The story rocked America's presidential campaign when The New York Times broke it Monday: "Huge Cache of Explosives Vanished From Site in Iraq." Within a day, Sen. John Kerry's campaign had a new ad that depicted the Times' story and said President Bush "failed to secure" the explosives after the U.S.-led invasion last year.That reminded us of an old bromide in the news business: Beware the damning story that breaks in the final days before an election. Chances are it didn't surface then by accident.
On Tuesday, syndicated columnist Linda Chavez faulted her colleagues in the news media for not investigating "truly startling evidence unearthed this week that the Communist Party may have been directing John Kerry's anti-war activities in the early 1970s." As proof, Chavez cited captured communist records now held by the Vietnam Center at Texas Tech University.Wow! Loose weapons and commie puppeteers! Life wasn't this scary when (you choose) Ronald Reagan/Bill Clinton was in charge.
Late-breaking mud, often stirred to a sticky thickness by partisan leakers of news tips, is a staple of presidential campaigns. This year, though, a mudslide of charges is oozing into print and broadcast reports. It has tended to reinforce the perception among some Americans that many journalists are rooting for Kerry.
No, we're not going to skip down that path holding hands with Rush Limbaugh. But it's harder to refute those suspicions when CBS, which reported the weapons story cooperatively with the Times, acknowledges that it originally planned to break the scoop on "60 Minutes" this Sunday--two days before the election.
Had that occurred, many voters wouldn't have had time to learn about Monday's follow-up report from NBC, which had a reporter embedded with U.S. troops who arrived at the weapons site in question one day after the fall of Baghdad--and who didn't observe those 380 tons of high explosives. Could Saddam Hussein have moved his stockpile? Nor would many voters have learned two points that add crucial perspective: first, that 400,000 tons of Hussein's munitions have been captured or destroyed by coalition troops, and second, that the recent Duelfer report on Iraqi arms puts the number of Hussein's weapons caches at more than 10,000. The bottom line: It's not yet clear that the explosives were even present when U.S. troops arrived.
I think the Tribune’s admonition to “beware the damning story that breaks in the final days before the election” is advice well heeded. But there is a difference between the NYT/CBS hit job and the Linda Chavez piece they compared: the mainstream media ran with the NYT story on every network. And meanwhile the Chavez piece was buried by the very same media outlets.
The Tribune aren’t the only ones alarmed: check out this piece on the “Media disgrace” in this election by Thomas Sowell.
