At the end of last August, CJR Daily first offered a verdict on the Kerry-in-Vietnam kerfuffle kept alive by the ironically named Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.
The culprit (not surprisingly): the press. The crime: a bias toward conflict, most especially manufactured conflict fabricated for headlines. At the time, we wrote, “With its natural bias toward ratings-generating conflict, the media readily embraced the SBVFT story, which, with its harsh allegations and clearly demarcated opposing sides, had about it the smell of blood in the water.”
Yesterday, the Boston Globe reported that on May 20 Sen. Kerry finally signed Standard Form 180, authorizing release of his full military and medical records. As you may recall, during the presidential election campaign last year, SBVFT “demanded” that Kerry sign the form. The implication: Since he hadn’t, he must be hiding some deep, dark secret. As it turns out, the Globe, which obtained the records from the Navy Personnel Command, found that the records were “mostly a duplication of what Kerry released during his 2004 campaign for president,” providing no smoking gun, or whatever else the Swift Boat Vets were hoping for. The lack of damaging records quickly called into question Kerry’s decision not to release the information during the campaign.
And, once again, the press managed to find a way to bend the story around conflict. First off, as Media Matters documented yesterday, the Boston Globe buried the piece about Kerry’s 180 sign-off that vindicated his service record and discredited the dark suspicions of the SBVFT, running it on page 7. (Among other things, the Globe found that the records contained “numerous commendations from commanding officers who later criticized Kerry’s Vietnam service.”)
The Globe, however, thought something in the records deserved front-page coverage. That would be: “During last year’s presidential campaign, John F. Kerry was the candidate often portrayed as intellectual and complex, while George W. Bush was the populist who mangled his sentences. But newly released records show that Bush and Kerry had a virtually identical grade average at Yale University four decades ago.” (Italics Ours.) And, sure enough, all day yesterday the Web sites of CNN, Fox News, and other outlets fronted the story on Kerry’s college grades. And the AP story, which many of the sites published, made no mention at all of the other information found — or, more accurately not found — in Kerry’s records.
Meantime, John O’Neill, long-time Kerry nemesis and one of the architects of the SBFVT, told the Globe that his opinion of Kerry would remain the same — notwithstanding all the disappointed conspiracists left holding the empty bag of Kerry’s Form 180. For its part, the Los Angeles Times lent a megaphone to O’Neill to stoutly declare, “We asked [Kerry] to universally release his entire file, and what we’ve seen instead is a parceling out of incomplete records.” In truth, by signing the Standard Form 180, Kerry followed through with precisely what O’Neill’s group had been demanding since May 2004 — something the Times did not clarify for its readers.
That’s it. Game, set, match. Time for Mr. O’Neill to pack up his mud balls, slink off the rhetorical playground and find another venue.
Alas, if he does, a press addicted to conflict — manufactured or otherwise — will be there, eager to print whatever spin is thrown its way.
Count on it.
–Thomas Lang
Thomas Lang was a writer at CJR Daily.