Every weekday, FOX News Channel chief political correspondent Carl Cameron appears on FOX News Channel's Special Report with Brit Hume. Cameron routinely scrutinizes claims Kerry makes on the stump, often accusing him of making misleading statements -- even when Kerry's statements are true. By contrast, when FOX News Channel senior White House correspondent Jim Angle reports on the Bush campaign for Special Report, he rarely corrects President George W. Bush's frequent distortions and often reports Bush's misleading attacks on Kerry as fact.

For example, Angle's October 18 report focused on Bush's speech that day in New Jersey and a new Bush-Cheney '04 TV spot. Angle showed clips from Bush's speech in which Bush told flagrant falsehoods about Kerry's statements on foreign policy, but Angle did not mention that the president's statements were false. Angle also referred to Kerry's “opposition to preemptive action” as though this alleged opposition were a fact rather than a misleading Bush campaign attack:

ANGLE: President Bush delivered a broadside attack on Senator Kerry's approach to the war on terror, telling a New Jersey audience, “This is not the time for confusion.”

BUSH: [video clip from New Jersey speech] He says that preemptive action is unwise. Not only against regimes, but even against terrorist organizations.

ANGLE: The president argued that Kerry's worldview did not change after September 11. And that in the age of terror, his opposition to preemptive action is dangerous.

BUSH: [video clip] Senator Kerry's approach would permit a response only after America is hit.

Bush based this attack on a single quotation from a March 5, 2003, op-ed by Kerry in The Boston Globe. In his speech, Bush quoted Kerry out of context, saying: “He [Kerry] has complained that my administration, quote, 'relies unwisely on the threat of military preemption against terrorist organizations.'” Here's what Kerry actually wrote in the Globe op-ed: “It is troubling that this administration's approach to the menace of loose nuclear materials is long on rhetoric but short on execution. It relies unwisely on the threat of military preemption against terrorist organizations, which can be defeated if they are found but will not be deterred by our military might.” As the context makes clear, Kerry wasn't ruling out preemption. Rather, Kerry was criticizing what he viewed as Bush's excessive reliance on this option in dealing with one particular threat -- “the menace of loose nuclear materials” -- to the exclusion of other approaches. Nothing Kerry wrote in the op-ed ruled out preemption.

In the first presidential debate, in response to a direct question on the issue from debate moderator Jim Lehrer, Kerry stated unambiguously that he supports preemption when necessary:

LEHRER: What is your position on the whole concept of preemptive war?

KERRY: The president always has the right, and always has had the right, for preemptive strike. That was a great doctrine throughout the Cold War. ... No president, through all of American history, has ever ceded, and nor would I, the right to preempt in any way necessary to protect the United States of America.

Angle never pointed out that Bush was lying about Kerry's position. Near the end of the report, after Bush's remarks had already gone unchallenged, Angle added, “Senator Kerry said he would use preemptive action if there were an imminent terrorist attack.” But this addition near the end of the report suggested that Kerry had responded to Bush's recent attacks with a new position rather than that Kerry has repeatedly expressed his willingness as president to use preemptive action if necessary.

Cameron's October 18 report aired just after Angle's, but its tone and content differed markedly. Cameron focused on Kerry's speech that day in Florida, and on a New York Times report on a recent revelation by “congressional and administration officials” that the Health and Human Services Department (HHS) has set aside only enough vaccine for 530 people. Cameron's claim that “more than a million anthrax” vaccines are available is simply a repetition of HHS's and the Pentagon's response when asked to comment on the shortage for the Times article. The article explained that while the federal government had pledged to build a separate stockpile of vaccine specifically for civilian use, it has failed to do so. The Pentagon supply that Cameron referenced is intended for soldiers, so "[i]f those doses were used by civilians in an emergency, [Pentagon] officials said, military vaccinations would have to be curtailed or scaled back," the Times reported.

Referring to a speech in which Kerry quoted Bush verbatim and made true statements about Bush's positions on various specific health care issues, Cameron accused Kerry of a distortion. “Senator Kerry is arguing that the president is essentially off the map and [saying] 'quit whining, everything is OK.' Senator Kerry putting words in ... President Bush's mouth. Of course, the president has never said anything like that,” Cameron said.

Here's what Bush said in the October 13 presidential debate in response to Kerry's criticism of Bush's alleged failure to address a number of health care-related problems: “I want to remind people listening tonight that a plan is not a litany of complaints.” In his October 18 speech, Kerry seized on this remark:

KERRY: What does the president of the United States have to say about these out-of-control health care costs that are killing job creation and hurting middle-class families? In the debate the other night, he called these problems “a litany of complaints.”

There you have it, folks. George Bush's answer to our health care problems is to tell the American people, “stop whining.”

While “stop whining” is obviously not how Bush would characterize his health care position, Kerry's statement was a rhetorical gesture emphasizing what Kerry sees as Bush's failure to take health care issues seriously, not a distortion of a major Bush policy position. By contrast, Bush flatly misstated Kerry's position on how to protect the United States from terrorism.