Last week, Media Matters urged the media to challenge the Bush camp on their lies, rather than simply repeating them, or treating them as a difference of opinion.

This week, ABC News Political Unit's The Note took up our call.

Week ending August 20, 2004
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Last week, Media Matters urged the media to challenge the Bush camp on their lies, rather than simply repeating them, or treating them as a difference of opinion.

This week, ABC News Political Unit's The Note took up our call:

“Does anyone watching the data flow, however, dispute the fact that if you created this formula: infidelity to accuracy + the personal nature of the charges + the closeness of the charger to the official campaign itself = the 'winner' of the 'going negative' battle -- that the Republican Party, historically and currently, would claim the title?

[...]

Presidential politics ain't beanbag, and we don't think the press' role is to police or inhibit speech of any sort, but the rough stuff and the factually questionable stuff needs to be called out for what it is.

So our last question of the day is: Are the political reporters at the remaining serious news organizations in America ready to do their jobs for a few more months in a way that does the nation proud, or are we going to cede this to Drudge?

More noteworthy than The Note's encouragement of media refutations of ”the factually questionable stuff" is that MSNBC Hardball host Chris Matthews did just that this week. Matthews confronted Republican National Committee senior adviser Matthew Dowd on distortions of Kerry's comments by Bush and the RNC. On the January 6 edition of Hardball, Matthews had asked Kerry if Kerry was “more or less are unhappy with this war”; Kerry responded:

“I am. Yes. In the sense that I don't believe the president took to us war as he should have, yes. Absolutely. Do I think this president violated his promises to America? Yes, I do, Chris. Was there a way to hold Saddam Hussein accountable? You bet there was and we should have done it right.”

The RNC, George W. Bush, and Dick Cheney have all claimed, based on that exchange, that Kerry “declare[d] himself the anti-war candidate” -- despite, as Matthews pointed out on August 16, Kerry said he considered himself an “anti-war candidate” only “in the sense” that he opposed the way the Bush administration “took us to war.” Although Bush and the RNC were obviously mischaracterizing Kerry's statement, that didn't stop media outlets like The Washington Times, The New York Sun, and National Review Washington editor Kate O'Beirne from repeating Bush's lies.

Chris Matthews, however, did the right thing: He called Dowd on Bush's lies and demanded, "[A]re you going to get him [Bush] to stop saying that John Kerry declared himself the anti-war candidate, which is clearly not what he said because I used the word 'anti-war candidate' and I referred to a number of them? You say what he said on my show and he didn't say that. That's all I'm asking. ... Would you like to have your sentences cut down like to a third of their length and let people decide on the first three or four words what you meant by the 20 words?"

Matthews's decision to challenge the Bush camp's distortions is commendable (as is Jon Stewart's willingness to do the same). Hopefully others will follow their lead.

Swift Boat Vets Update: They're Still Liars

The ironically named Swift Boat Veterans for Truth haven't gone away yet, and they haven't stopped lying.

In light of SBVT's complete lack of credibility, and recent reports in The Washington Post and The New York Times that eviscerate their claims, MMFA has sent a letter to three of the nation's largest booksellers, asking that they take reasonable measures to alert their customers that Unfit for Command is a paid political hatchet job, full of false allegations and lies.

It's worth keeping in mind the way the media and others reacted to another campaign-season attack book: Fortunate Son, James Hatfield's 1999 biography of George W. Bush. Fortunate Son, like Unfit for Command, contained questionable, false, and unverifiable claims about a presidential candidate. Fortunate Son's author, like Unfit for Command's co-authors John O'Neill and Jerome Corsi, had serious credibility problems.

But unlike Unfit for Command, Fortunate Son received scant media coverage -- other than coverage of Hatfield's history. Fortunate Son's publisher ultimately pulled the book after an avalanche of criticism -- a decision the Bush campaign applauded. In stark contrast with the media's treatment of the allegations in Fortunate Son, the Swift Boat Vets' allegations have gotten heavy media coverage this year. New polling by the University of Pennsylvania's National Annenberg Election Survey has found that more than half of the country has “heard about or seen” the Swift Boat Vets' ad. “The influence of this ad is a function not of paid exposure but of the ad's treatment in free media,” Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the survey and of The Annenberg Public Policy Center explained. “The advertisement has received extensive coverage, particularly on conservative talk radio and cable news channels and has been the subject of some attention in broadcast news as well.”

As for the Swift Boat Vets themselves, SBVT co-founder John O'Neill again took the lead in the group's smear campaign, and again made claims that are clearly rebutted by government records. Last week, O'Neill claimed he has “had no serious involvement in politics of any kind in over 32 years.” When MMFA showed that O'Neill has made nearly $15,000 in federal contributions to Republican candidates and causes since 1990 -- and none to Democrats -- O'Neill claimed on August 17 that $7,000 of that was actually made by his “law partner who has almost the same name, Edward J. O'Neil.” But that's not what Federal Election Commission records say.

O'Neill also recently made the bizarre claim on Hardball that John Kerry didn't serve two tours in Vietnam, because, “The USS Gridley was not a tour in Vietnam.” But that's not true; Hardball host Chris Matthews got O'Neill to concede that Kerry's service of the USS Gridley was “recorded as combat theater duty” and that during that service Kerry was “given credit by the Navy for serving in Vietnam.”

O'Neill wasn't the only Swift Boat Vet doing the heavy lying -- er, “lifting” -- though; he was joined by Steven Gardner, the only one of Senator John Kerry's swift boat crewmates from the Vietnam War who has come out in opposition to Kerry's presidential campaign. Gardner claimed on August 16 that three of Kerry's other crewmates “felt the same way that I felt about John Kerry” before they joined the Kerry campaign. But comments made months ago by one of the men he named contradict his claims. While Gardner now claims that Jim Wasser agreed with him, historian Douglas Brinkley wrote in March that Wasser told him Gardner “has developed a strange, negative assessment of Lieutenant Kerry. It shocked me. His memory is dead wrong. He remembers things so differently. ... He has some kind of weird grudge against Lieutenant Kerry.”

On August 19, The Washington Post dealt a devastating blow to the credibility of yet another Swift Boater, Larry Thurlow. “Newly obtained military records of one of Sen. John F. Kerry's most vocal critics, who has accused the Democratic presidential candidate of lying about his wartime record to win medals, contradict his own version of events. ... Thurlow ... has strongly disputed Kerry's claim that the Massachusetts Democrat's boat came under fire during a mission in Viet Cong-controlled territory on March 13, 1969. Kerry won a Bronze Star for his actions that day. But Thurlow's military records, portions of which were released yesterday to The Washington Post under the Freedom of Information Act, contain several references to 'enemy small arms and automatic weapons fire' directed at 'all units' of the five-boat flotilla. Thurlow won his own Bronze Star that day, and the citation praises him for providing assistance to a damaged Swift boat 'despite enemy bullets flying about him.'”

But while the Swift Boat Vets' credibility sinks lower and lower each passing day, right-wing commentators haven't stopped shilling for them. On August 16, conservative radio hosts Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin and pundit Ann Coulter all falsely accused Kerry of refusing to release his military records; Levin claimed Kerry's release of his records would “clear it all up.” But Kerry has already released his military records (they're hidden in plain sight on his website), and they have already "cleared it all up" -- to everyone but blind partisans like Coulter, who referred to Kerry's “alleged Purple Hearts.”

Finally, FOX host Brit Hume complained on August 16 that “except for FOX News here, no major news organization has reported on the specifics of Unfit for Command. Granting for a moment Hume's odd premise that it's a bad thing that news organizations would ignore the ”specifics" of a fraudulent pack of lies like Unfit for Command, Hume is just plain wrong about media coverage of the book. Co-author John O'Neill made several appearances on cable news networks in the weeks leading up to the book's release -- and, as Media Matters for America has documented, many of O'Neill's demonstrably false allegations went unchallenged during his appearances on MSNBC's Scarborough Country and CNN's Wolf Blitzer Reports. In addition to O'Neill's appearances, ABC, NBC, MSNBC, and CNBC have all run stories reporting on the allegations by O'Neill and his group.

Jamison Foser is Executive Vice President at Media Matters for America.