Journalists failed on swift boat ads

Just how dishonest must a smear campaign be for American journalists to say so plainly or, better yet, to ignore altogether? That’s the only real question still unanswered in the controversy sparked by the group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth over John Kerry’s service in Vietnam – although even to use the word “controversy” affords the issue’s protagonists too much dignity. The veterans featured in the organization’s TV ad claim to have “served with Kerry,” but none actually served on the same boat. (Yes, we’ve been reduced to arguing over what the definition of “with” is.) Several of the charges are based on recollections by veterans who, years earlier, had praised Kerry for the very same actions. The accusation that Kerry faked one of his injuries turns out to come from a third-hand account. Most important of all, the surviving crewmembers from Kerry’s boat – as well as Navy records – back Kerry’s version of events. As the Los Angeles Times editorialized this week, citing one of its own reporters’ fine work debunking the Swift Boat Veterans, “no informed person can seriously believe that Kerry fabricated evidence to win his military medals.”

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. “Both sides have withheld information from the public record and provided an incomplete, and sometimes inaccurate, picture of what took place,” read the key passage from a lengthy front-page story in Sunday’s Post. “But although Kerry’s accusers have succeeded in raising doubts about his war record, they have failed to come up with sufficient evidence to prove him a liar.” 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.

But it wasn’t primarily the print media that kept this story alive. It was television, particularly cable news, with all of its now-familiar pathologies. Predictably, Fox News hyped the story, weaving it seamlessly into a larger narrative about Kerry’s character flaws. (Here’s Brit Hume, Fox’s analogue to Peter Jennings or Dan Rather: “There’s a thread here that one might trace through the criticisms of John Kerry and his behavior, even in this campaign, and that is the sense of somebody who is an absolutely incorrigible opportunist.”) And the less ideological CNN and MSNBC did their parts to sustain the controversy by running the Swift Boat ads repeatedly during their news segments, then giving the same old discredited Kerry critics a platform to continue spewing their same old discredited arguments.

The effect was to spread lies rather than scrutinize them, in a precise perversion of journalism’s supposed purpose. More than half of the respondents to a survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center said they had seen or heard of the Swift Boat ad, which initially ran in only three swing states. And the polling firm HCD Research found that 27 percent of independent voters who saw the ad and “who [had] planned to vote for Kerry or leaned pro-Kerry” were “no longer sure they’d back” him.

Journalists, in short, became accomplices to fraud. And they should have known better. In 2000, Bush and his right-wing allies learned that the way to win political arguments is to launch rhetorical attacks based only loosely – if at all – on the facts and then depend on reporters to spread them as credible perspectives on the truth. And, ever since, this White House has conducted its business the very same way, shamelessly peddling lies about everything from budget projections to weapons of mass destruction without the slightest fear of retribution.

A few days ago, cable news had a rare moment of clarity when an unlikely voice of reason, MSNBC “Hardball” host Chris Matthews, lashed out at conservative pundit Michelle Malkin for suggesting that Kerry had shot himself to win a Purple Heart – an accusation even more farfetched than the swift boat ads. As Matthews later told columnist Lloyd Grove, “If someone is saying something that factually can’t be proved, it’s my job to call them on it.” He’s absolutely right. How sad that he’s largely alone.