915 Kerry blames the media--just not the right ones

Now John Kerry is blaming the media for his failures last fall. Says they are biased toward Bush. That’s so absurd it is laughable--just pathetic. Every book store and library I stepped into was loaded with anti-Bush material. The mainstream media went out of their way to report negatively about Bush and ignored the charges of the Swiftboat Veterans when they surfaced in March 2004. Even when their book was on the best seller list, it wasn’t reviewed in the major sources. It seemed half the country knew about the Swiftboat Vets but ABC, NBC, CBS and CNN were afraid of Kerry--or hated Bush too much.

So Kerry isn’t pointing fingers at the MSM, because he can’t. According to Howard Kurtz in WaPo,

"'We learned,' Kerry continued, 'that the mainstream media, over the course of the last year, did a pretty good job of discerning. But there's a subculture and a sub-media that talks and keeps things going for entertainment purposes rather than for the flow of information. And that has a profound impact and undermines what we call the mainstream media of the country. And so the decision-making ability of the American electorate has been profoundly impacted as a consequence of that. The question is, what are we going to do about it?'"

A sub-media that keeps things going for entertainment purposes? Wouldn't this include "Hardball" and "Crossfire" as well as O'Reilly? Al Franken as well as Rush Limbaugh? Cable networks going wild over Scott Peterson and the Jacko trial? For some reason, Kerry exonerates the mainstream media for some of the same sins he sees in other parts of the news/info world.”

Yes, it does look like bias--but not against Kerry. Fortunately, says John O’Neill, in a recent interview, Kerry threatened stations after the first ad appeared in August (the Vets had hoped their March story would keep him from being nominated so the Democrats would have time to select someone else--many weren’t Republicans).

“The threats against the station managers led to extensive publicity, particularly on the "Hannity and Colmes]" show and then on other FOX News shows. Then it spread to CNN and to MSNBC. More than 1,400,000 people downloaded that first ad, and it swept through the Internet. It also allowed thousands and thousands of people to start donating money to us at our Web site.

Three weeks after it was put up, half of all the people in the United States had heard about that ad and about us and yet there had never been a story about us on ABC, NBC, or CBS or in the New York Times.”

Some good has come out of the torturous months and threats the Swiftboat Vets endured. O’Neill says:

“It haunts all of us that the first Vietnam veteran nominated for President would be John Kerry--the very last person most veterans would pick for high office. But it is ironic that his run for the White House may have finally initiated some less fictionalized thinking about the war.”