The Left Coaster has a great article from Toronto’s The Globe and Mail, with the Left Coaster commenting: “Sometimes it takes a concerned neighbor to gently point out your dog is acting nuts.” The media is the message. Now we know why Bush doesn’t need to read the papers, the headlines do tell it all. From the New Republic (subscription required, sorry) about the Republican Operative Swift Boat Veterans (engaged primarily in falsehood):
“Unfortunately, even as reporters eviscerated the Swift Boat Veterans’ essential claims, the conventions of evenhandedness (at least on news, as opposed to editorial, pages) prevented them from stating their findings in bald, unvarnished terms. And so writers for papers like The Washington Post repeatedly played the dispute as a he-said, she-said campaign argument, seizing on the relatively minor discrepancies in Kerry’s story (chiefly Kerry’s questionable claim that his boat had gone into Cambodia on Christmas Eve, 1968) and then balancing those against the far more egregious distortions they had found in the swift boat ads.
….
And, while careful readers could parse the truth, more casual readers were left to take their cues from headlines like ‘Veterans Battle Over the Truth’ or ‘Swift Boat Accounts Incomplete,’ which compounded the misimpression that there was something ambiguous, if not downright suspicious, about Kerry’s military record.”
The press doesn’t need to take sides formally, if it can be played in this cheap way. There is sometimes merit in getting laughs out of your message. Too bad the American media problem has gotten so serious that laughs are becoming all that counts.
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