Reply #18: The media already had more on the truth than they needed to [View All]

act honestly and reject it. Kerry was a war hero - this was not,like most Clinton issues, something negative that had to be spun. The way anyone who was 100% in the right has always been to give the media proof - which is exactly what Kerry did. Since then he has admitted that they needed to spend more on ads. The problem was that that would come out of the money he was limited to for his 13 week general election. (Bush had an 8 week general election - Thanks Mr McAuliffe!) That's the motivation for Obama NOT to take public financing. I suspect that it might not have helped - but added to the he said/they said nature. the problem was that the media by giving it a huge amount of time tacitly gave it credibility. The fact is that Kerry, was rewarded for serving his country, by a media condoned character assassination followed by a second character assassination by elements in his own party (who later had the utter chutzpah to whine that after all they did he didn't endorse them) which blamed not the media, but Kerry for not responding.

When the issue first came up in April 2004, the Senator put over 100 pages of Naval records on his website. There were fitness reports, which spanned the entire interval, and they were all glowingly positive - and many were written by future SBVT. This made them go away then.

In August when they returned, the media already had: - those Navy records
- the knowledge that every man on his boat when he got any medal was 100% behind him. - Nixon tapes, never intended for us to hear, showed they investigated him found he was a war hero and clean - Brinkley, was an academic historian, who was well thought of enough to be the editor of Reagan's diaries. Kerry had no editorial control and many future SBVT were interviewed around 2 years before the election and only one had any problems with him then - and that guy simply didn't like him and likely resented that the guys who reported to both of them loved Kerry.

in addition, the Kerry campaign gave the media a 36 page report disputing specific claims and they showed that the SBVT were funded by Bush supporters out of Texas.

In any previous election, providing a fraction of this proof against allegations with no proof behind them would have blown them out of the water and it would have backfired. The Clinton war machine never provided anything like this - on most things even in the end allegations were in fact not completely discredited but sometimes admitted.

Kerry also did speak against the charges in front of the firefighters - but the media which gave thousands of hours of free coverage to the liars didn't give it much coverage. (click on the picture of the Senator to see what he said: http://www.kerryvision.net/2007/08/jk_the_fire_fighters.html
If you still doubt the media was biased on this ask yourself why the media treated the purple heart bandaids as if they were campaign novelty hats. Where was the outrage that the medal all military people who are wounded get was mocked. This showed how real the respect for the troops really was in the media. It did send a signal that the media thought this was fair - which hurt.

In spite of this by November any fair minded person knew the truth - Senator Kerry was a war hero per the Navy - and it was the Navy that said he was.