Washington Times columnist Suzanne Fields, whose column is syndicated by Tribune Media Services, became the latest in a long line of conservative media figures to take Teresa Heinz Kerry's use of the word “scumbags” out of context. In the September 30 edition of The Washington Times, in a column titled "Sizing up the 'wives of'," Fields wrote: “She's [Teresa Heinz Kerry's] graceless as a 'wife of,' afflicted with a tin ear. Her coarse vulgarity in calling her husband's critics 'scumbags' might work around a kitchen table of partisan feminists having a cup of coffee together, but in a presidential campaign it's a little (or a lot) over the top.” But as Media Matters for America previously noted, Fields's assertion is simply not correct.

In April, Heinz Kerry gave an interview to Pittsburgh's Channel 4 Action News (WTAE-TV) anchor Sally Wiggin, in which she was asked whether she thought “some of the nobility has gone out of public service.” Heinz Kerry responded: “Oh, there is a lot of scumbags everywhere. Not just in politics. In everything. There are a lot of immoral people everywhere.”

In a September 20 New Yorker article, Judith Thurman distorted Heinz Kerry's statement, claiming that Senator John Kerry's wife “employed the word 'scumbags' to describe some of her detractors.” Conservative news outlets then echoed Thurman's distortion of Heinz Kerry's comment; in response to that distortion, Channel 4 set the record straight in a September 20 article titled "New Yorker Magazine Quotes Teresa Heinz Kerry Out Of Context."

This is not the first time the “scumbags” distortion has appeared in The Washington Times. In his September 21 “Inside Politics” column, under the header “Teresa's 'vulgarity,'” Times columnist Greg Pierce wrote:

Teresa Heinz Kerry recently referred to her critics as "scumbags," Judith Thurman writes in the latest issue of the New Yorker.

“Despite her linguistic prowess and her worldliness, Heinz Kerry has, at times, a deaf ear for the nuances of slang, code, condescension and vulgarity in English - for the emotion of the language,” the writer said.

"'There are these bizarre moments that make you shudder,' the [unnamed] Kerry adviser said. 'Like calling herself African-American to black audiences.' She dismissed voters skeptical of her husband's health-care proposals as 'idiots,' and, in a television interview with a Pittsburgh anchorwoman, employed the word 'scumbags' to describe some of her detractors.

“I doubt that she knows the literal meaning of 'scumbag,' but perhaps, after 40 years in America, nearly 30 of them as a political wife, observing how the flaws and contradictions of a personality as complex as hers are melted down for ammunition by the other side, she should have learned it.”