Sunday, November 14, 2004
The Ten Worst Media Distortions of Campaign 2004
Campaign 2004 will be remembered for the unprecedented partisanship of the so-called mainstream media, as the Media Research Center has documented all year. Here are our awards for the ten most-biased episodes in Campaign 2004.
1. Dan Rather’s Forgery Fiasco
On September 8, Dan Rather led off his CBS Evening News by touting four exclusively-obtained “memos” purportedly showing that George W. Bush’s squadron commander, Jerry Killian, was fed up with the young Air National Guard Lieutenant’s failure to get a physical exam. The same documents also starred on 60 Minutes that night.
2. Ignoring, then Attacking, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth
Then on May 4, a group of more than 250 Vietnam veterans, including Kerry’s superior officers and many who served with him when he was a Swift Boat commander, launched a public challenge to Kerry’s version of Vietnam. They charged Kerry had greatly embellished his military record and betrayed his fellow Swift Boat veterans when he went before the Senate to make sweeping charges of American war crimes in Vietnam. Based on this record, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth declared Kerry “unfit” to serve as Commander in Chief.
3. Pounding the Bush National Guard Story
The networks did their best to ignore or demean the Vietnam veterans who criticized John Kerry’s military service and post-Vietnam activities as an anti-war activist, but when Democratic partisans like Terry McAuliffe and Michael Moore in February challenged President Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard, reporters quickly adopted the issue as their own and criticized as unsatisfactory every answer provided by the White House.
4. Spinning a Good Economy into Bad News
Today unemployment is 5.4 percent, inflation 2.7 percent, and economists’ consensus forecast for economic growth this quarter is 3.7 percent. But the networks have stressed the downside of the most positive economic reports, and given wide play to any statistics suggesting weakness.
5. The Networks’ Outrageous Convention Double-Standard
The media’s bias was never clearer than when it came to the two party conventions. In Boston, network journalists touted Democratic speakers as “rock stars,” but at the Republican convention in New York those same reporters led the resistance.
6. Swooning Over Edwards’ Image, Ignoring His Liberalism
When George W. Bush selected Dick Cheney as his running mate in 2000, the networks went into overdrive warning audiences that the man who turned out to be their next Vice President was a “hard right” conservative. But after John Kerry selected John Edwards as his running mate on July 6, those same networks skipped over Edwards’ strict liberal voting record, instead touting the supposedly wonderful image and personality of the ex-trial lawyer.
7. CBS’s Byron Pitts Promotional Kerry Coverage
Most reporters, believing it their job to point out any newsworthy contradictions or gaffes and to ask tough questions of the candidate and his team. But CBS’s Byron Pitts seemed to define his job as transcribing the Kerry campaign’s spin points and supinely passing them off as news.
8. CBS Promotes Fears of a New Military Draft
On the September 28 CBS Evening News,decided to give legitimacy to Internet rumors by devoting one of its election-year “What Does It Mean to You?” segments to “fears” of a supposedly Bush-supporting mother that President Bush will impose a military draft.
9. Misrepresenting the 9/11 Commission on Iraq/al-Qaeda Links
On June 16, the networks pounced on one sentence on the fifth page of a 9/11 Commission report released earlier in the day, which declared: “We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al-Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States.”
All three broadcast networks twisted that sentence into an utter rejection of the administration’s case for war, only to be reprimanded by the 9/11 Commissioners the next day.
10. Equating New Terrorism Warning to LBJ’s “Gulf of Tonkin”
On his August 2 MSNBC program Countdown, Keith Olbermann devoted an entire segment to speculation that Bush re-election politics lay behind a terror threat warning that the Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge issued the day before.
Olbermann revealed his paranoid mindset: “History tells us Presidents have exaggerated threats to the public safety to gain political advantage or simplify complex needs of strategy. Ask Lyndon Johnson. Ask William McKinley. Do we need to ask George W. Bush?”
Olbermann soon added Joe McCarthy to the pantheon President Bush is supposedly following, “from Joe McCarthy to Lyndon Johnson’s manipulation of the Gulf of Tonkin, our politics have been filled with politicians who have created a kind of evil twin to FDR’s famous phrase, ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself.’
Campaign 2004 will be remembered for the unprecedented partisanship of the so-called mainstream media, as the Media Research Center has documented all year. Here are our awards for the ten most-biased episodes in Campaign 2004.
1. Dan Rather’s Forgery Fiasco
On September 8, Dan Rather led off his CBS Evening News by touting four exclusively-obtained “memos” purportedly showing that George W. Bush’s squadron commander, Jerry Killian, was fed up with the young Air National Guard Lieutenant’s failure to get a physical exam. The same documents also starred on 60 Minutes that night.
2. Ignoring, then Attacking, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth
Then on May 4, a group of more than 250 Vietnam veterans, including Kerry’s superior officers and many who served with him when he was a Swift Boat commander, launched a public challenge to Kerry’s version of Vietnam. They charged Kerry had greatly embellished his military record and betrayed his fellow Swift Boat veterans when he went before the Senate to make sweeping charges of American war crimes in Vietnam. Based on this record, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth declared Kerry “unfit” to serve as Commander in Chief.
3. Pounding the Bush National Guard Story
The networks did their best to ignore or demean the Vietnam veterans who criticized John Kerry’s military service and post-Vietnam activities as an anti-war activist, but when Democratic partisans like Terry McAuliffe and Michael Moore in February challenged President Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard, reporters quickly adopted the issue as their own and criticized as unsatisfactory every answer provided by the White House.
4. Spinning a Good Economy into Bad News
Today unemployment is 5.4 percent, inflation 2.7 percent, and economists’ consensus forecast for economic growth this quarter is 3.7 percent. But the networks have stressed the downside of the most positive economic reports, and given wide play to any statistics suggesting weakness.
5. The Networks’ Outrageous Convention Double-Standard
The media’s bias was never clearer than when it came to the two party conventions. In Boston, network journalists touted Democratic speakers as “rock stars,” but at the Republican convention in New York those same reporters led the resistance.
6. Swooning Over Edwards’ Image, Ignoring His Liberalism
When George W. Bush selected Dick Cheney as his running mate in 2000, the networks went into overdrive warning audiences that the man who turned out to be their next Vice President was a “hard right” conservative. But after John Kerry selected John Edwards as his running mate on July 6, those same networks skipped over Edwards’ strict liberal voting record, instead touting the supposedly wonderful image and personality of the ex-trial lawyer.
7. CBS’s Byron Pitts Promotional Kerry Coverage
Most reporters, believing it their job to point out any newsworthy contradictions or gaffes and to ask tough questions of the candidate and his team. But CBS’s Byron Pitts seemed to define his job as transcribing the Kerry campaign’s spin points and supinely passing them off as news.
8. CBS Promotes Fears of a New Military Draft
On the September 28 CBS Evening News,decided to give legitimacy to Internet rumors by devoting one of its election-year “What Does It Mean to You?” segments to “fears” of a supposedly Bush-supporting mother that President Bush will impose a military draft.
9. Misrepresenting the 9/11 Commission on Iraq/al-Qaeda Links
On June 16, the networks pounced on one sentence on the fifth page of a 9/11 Commission report released earlier in the day, which declared: “We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al-Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States.”
All three broadcast networks twisted that sentence into an utter rejection of the administration’s case for war, only to be reprimanded by the 9/11 Commissioners the next day.
10. Equating New Terrorism Warning to LBJ’s “Gulf of Tonkin”
On his August 2 MSNBC program Countdown, Keith Olbermann devoted an entire segment to speculation that Bush re-election politics lay behind a terror threat warning that the Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge issued the day before.
Olbermann revealed his paranoid mindset: “History tells us Presidents have exaggerated threats to the public safety to gain political advantage or simplify complex needs of strategy. Ask Lyndon Johnson. Ask William McKinley. Do we need to ask George W. Bush?”
Olbermann soon added Joe McCarthy to the pantheon President Bush is supposedly following, “from Joe McCarthy to Lyndon Johnson’s manipulation of the Gulf of Tonkin, our politics have been filled with politicians who have created a kind of evil twin to FDR’s famous phrase, ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself.’
