On the August 29 edition of CNN's Reliable Sources, host and Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz allowed his guests to voice two increasingly common distortions: (1) that Senator John Kerry's (D-MA) discussion of his military service in Vietnam somehow justifies the widely discredited attacks by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth; and (2) that reporters have failed to press Kerry to “denounce the ad” put out by MoveOn PAC attacking President George W. Bush's military record, despite the fact that Kerry condemned the ad as “inappropriate” on the day it first aired.

In response to a question from Kurtz about why the media is keeping the Swift Boat Veterans controversy “alive,” ABC News correspondent Chris Bury answered, "[B]ecause it's [Kerry's military service] the central tenet of John Kerry's campaign. ... And once that issue is open, it's fair game." As Media Matters for America has noted, Bury is not the first to make that assertion. But while honest scrutiny of that record might be “fair game,” Bury is suggesting that by talking about his service in Vietnam, Kerry has invited all attacks, no matter how unfounded, contradictory, and discredited.

Kurtz then posed a leading question to conservative syndicated columnist Debra J. Saunders (whose column is distributed by Creators Syndicate and appears on the Heritage Foundation website Townhall.com, but whom Kurtz identified only as a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle), asking her if there has “been a double standard in the media in not trying to make Kerry denounce the liberal ads, while reporters ask the president every day, 'Why won't you disassociate yourself from the Swift Boat ads?'” Saunders replied that there was indeed a double standard and said that she'd “never seen a reporter say to John Kerry, 'But couldn't you just denounce the ad?'”

In fact, Kerry did denounce the MoveOn PAC ad (which questioned Bush's military service) immediately after it aired, thereby obviating the need for the media to press him to do so. Furthermore, Kurtz's question implies that the charges leveled by the “liberal ads” are comparable to the demonstrably false charges in the Swift Boat Vets' ads. As MMFA has noted, Columbia Journalism Review's Campaign Desk weblog pointed out the absurdity of comparing the Swift Boat Vets ad to that of MoveOn.org. In contrast with the Swift Boat Vets' claims, wrote Campaign Desk, "[T]here's been no real argument that any of its assertions [in the MoveOn ad] are untrue." The Los Angeles Times editorial board captured the distinction between the two ads: “The pro-Kerry campaign is nasty and personal. The pro-Bush campaign is nasty, personal and false.”