Dumping Grounds

I was talking to Alan the other day about a series of media stories that had come out (or at least to my attention) on the same day.

The first was the supposed documents that “proved” that President Bush did not complete his military commitment to the National Guard during the early 1970’s.

The problem was that this document had an appearance that would have been difficult, if not impossible to produce with 1970’s technology. It was in an inappropriate font (which was, at the time, in an unapproved font for government memorandum) and had typesetting features that were damned near impossible to produce on a typewriter.

In other words, it was a forgery. A fairly sloppy forgery, which anyone who looked at this mysterious document through eyes that did not want to see something to help get John Kerry elected, would have very likely noticed right away.

This was not a mistake. This was intentional. The researchers knew it. CBS knows it. And Dan Rather knows it, too. Anyone surprised at how quickly this story has disappeared? When it reflected badly on a conservative President, it was trumpeted on every news cast. When it reflects poorly on a liberal news outlet, and a doddering old fool who stood by the story, it goes away in a day or two.

The second was a story carried by the Associated Press about a rally where the President was speaking, and while addressing the crowd, he wished former President Clinton a speedy recovery from his bypass surgery. At this point, the story reported, the crowd began to boo, and the President did nothing to stop them.

There was only one problem. There was video of the event. The video showed that there was no booing. No catcalls. No harassment or ill wishes expressed for the former President at all. I guess when the issues are not enough, when exaggerations and half-truths are not turning the public to think as you do, the press does what any red-blooded American would do. They just flat out lie. Just make it up. After all, even if you get caught, none of your friends in the media will cover the revised story, will they? Even the Associated Press never retracted the story. They simply deleted it. Again, the story disappeared almost immediately.

The story this election season is not the lies that the candidates are telling about one another. While the election has been nasty, and I expect it to get even more nasty as the differential in the polls gets even larger, the true story is that this was the year the media lost all perspective in reporting the news. This was the year that CBS and the Associates Press decided to enter the fiction market. After all, that’s where the money is, right?

In a column originally for the Rhinoceros Times, picked up by the Wall Street Journal, Orson Scott Card demonstrates this bias through samples he found in the paper one morning. The column is a bit too long for my tastes, in my opinion Card had proven his point long before he stops presenting examples. Keep in mind this article is written by a man who is a lifelong democrat, and yet believes that the party has left him (much like Zell Miller, only without that annoying bit of insanity).

Comments RSS