Reality check

The major print media has been asleep at the wheel, and so has the video media. Today, the Media Research Center details how the major networks ran 75 stories on the question of whether Bush was AWOL from the National Guard, only to learn that he was not and that he fulfilled his requirements.

But the networks have run only 9 stories on the Swift Vets' charges against Kerry, and as Rich Noyes notes:

Reporters put the onus on Bush to prove the critics wrong. “Given the absence of any witnesses who could fill in those gaps and corroborate the President’s recollection,“ ABC’s Terry Moran insisted on February 10, “the issue is not going to go away.” CBS was even more demanding . . .

But holes in Kerry’s record aren’t treated as suspicious. On the issue of Kerry’s first wound in 1968, then-Coastal Division 14 Commander Grant Hibbard says Kerry came to his office asking for a Purple Heart for what amounted to a scratch. As recounted in Unfit for Command (page 38), “I told Kerry to ‘forget it.’ There was no hostile fire, the injury was self-inflicted for all I knew, besides it was nothing more than a scratch. Kerry wasn’t getting a Purple Heart recommendation from me.” But when the issue became news in April, the networks made it a one-day story, even though the records Kerry released failed to include the paperwork supporting the Purple Heart award.

There's no question that the media is dodging this story because it casts its favored candidate in an unfavorable light. At this point, the media is merely parodying its own bias every night.