Over the weekend, the Associated Press did an unusual thing, and newspaper readers who witnessed the event took note. (Thanks to one of them for alerting Campaign Desk.)
Jennifer Loven, on the trail with the Bush campaign, filed a story detailing “several new scathing lines of attack” against John Kerry. What makes Loven’s story noteworthy — and worth widespread emulation by her colleagues — is this: It actually compared what Bush said Kerry said, with Kerry’s real words.
Instead of the run-of-the-mill he said/she said style so loved by the campaign media (and despised by us here at Campaign Desk World Headquarters), Loven quotes Bush’s comments about Kerry and Iraq, and then supplies what Kerry actually said.
Example:
[Bush] stated flatly that Kerry had said earlier in the week “he would prefer the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein to the situation in Iraq today.” The line drew gasps of surprise from Bush’s audience in a Racine, Wis., park. “I just strongly disagree,” the president said.
But Kerry never said that. In a speech at New York University on Monday, he called Saddam “a brutal dictator who deserves his own special place in hell.” He added, “The satisfaction we take in his downfall does not hide this fact: We have traded a dictator for a chaos that has left America less secure.”
The Kerry camp has done the same thing, writes (and fact-checks) Loven. In response to a remark by George Bush on Iraq, Kerry campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill emailed reporters saying Bush had “no plan to get us out of Iraq.” Writes Loven: “Bush has a plan for Iraq — Kerry just disagrees that it is working.”
If this is just a preview of what’s to come in the waning days of the campaign — a press actually checking claims against known fact — we have just one thing to say: Bring it on.
–SQS
Susan Q. Stranahan wrote for CJR.