politics

Wanna See ‘Inarticulate,’ Kerry? Catch This Headline

September 29, 2004

We noticed an odd headline on an Associated Press story on Yahoo News: “Kerry Calls Vote Change ‘Inarticulate.'”

How can a change of votes be “inarticulate,” we wondered.

But the story’s first paragraph cleared things up: “On the eve of a foreign policy debate with President Bush, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry said in an interview that his original explanation of why he voted in favor of additional funding for the war in Iraq before voting against it was ‘one of those inarticulate moments’ in the campaign.”

So Kerry wasn’t calling his voting record itself “inarticulate” — he was referring to his much-mocked assertion that “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I vote against it.”

Here’s what Kerry actually said, in an interview broadcast Wednesday morning on ABC’s “Good Morning America”: “It was a very inarticulate way of saying something and I had one of those inarticulate moments late in the evening when I was dead tired in the primaries and didn’t say something clearly. But it reflects the truth of the position, which is I thought to have the wealthiest people in America share the burden of paying for that war. It was a protest. Sometimes you have to stand up and be counted.” (The AP article offers a truncated version of this quote in its fourth paragraph).

ABC did even worse. It has its own copy of the AP story on its website, but it one-ups the headline on Yahoo News by adding the sub-headline “John Kerry Describes Change in Vote for More Funding of War in Iraq As ‘Inarticulate Moment.'”

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One more time, boys and girls: He didn’t call the change in vote “inarticulate”; he described his earlier attempt to explain that change as “inarticulate.”

The campaign spin masters are already having a field day slicing, dicing and distorting their opponents’ words — there’s no reason for headline writers at AP and/or Yahoo to give them a head start by doing the mangling themselves.

–Susanna Dilliplane

Susanna Dilliplane is a contributor to CJR.