The Swift Boat Saga, Part XIV: The Mainstream Media Continues to Fade

The Swift Boat Veterans Saga has been Exhibit 1 in the decline of the so-called mainstream media, which we'll define here as most newspapers and the network news channels (in other words, all TV news save Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC, assuming anyone is watching MSNBC). These are the traditional sources of information people have turned to in the past when looking for news.

Since the public was limited in the number of sources it had for news, this meant the news organizations themselves exercised tremendous power. Most newspapers in the business followed the lead of big city papers such as the left-wing dishrag when reporting national news. And wire services, while they reported on everything everywhere, had the power to influence the initial slant of a story as much as anyone.

Now, of course, the traditional media has to cope with competition. For years, it was the network news, trying to swim against the tide of cable news shows that report anything and everything in a search for programming, ending the dominance of network news anchors like Brokaw, Jennings and Rather. And they had to deal with the growth of talk radio, which fueled a conservative counter-point to the typically liberal slant on the evening news as well. By the time Fox News enterted the fray in the mid-90's, network news was well into a slow decline in viewership.

But now, it's newspapers who face this issue head-on, in the form of the Internet and websites that update news constantly and force stories to the forefront. Drudge effectively broke the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal in 1998, but the Internet had only started to step to the fore. What it's doing now is dragging the mainstream media, kicking and screaming, to cover stories they'd rather not discuss.

Glenn Reynolds, otherwise known as Instapundit, summed it up beautifully in a column at TechCentralStation while discussing the decline of the media...

That decline is partly technological in origin. Monopolistic or oligopolistic newspapers and broadcast outlets were the result of technology: economies of scale and scope that rewarded consolidation and led to virtually no competition among newspapers and very little among broadcasters. Now that's changing, as alternative outlets like talk radio, cable television, and, especially, the Internet, have almost completely removed the traditional barriers to entry and allowed competition.

But the loss of those barriers isn't the biggest problem faced by the mainstream media. The biggest problem is that, like most monopolists, they've spent so many years enjoying their position and not worrying about quality that they're left floundering now that competition is exposing their faults. Like the folks at GM who couldn't understand why people were buying Toyotas all of a sudden back in the 1970s, today's Big Media folks are shocked to see ratings and circulation numbers falling while readership for Internet sites skyrockets. And, like the auto executives, they're even starting to mumble about the need for protection.

But it won't work, of course. And -- much like the release of the Chevrolet Vega, the Ford Fairmont, or the AMC Pacer -- the press's coverage of the 2004 presidential election has revealed an industry in deep trouble. One problem is that even the pretense of evenhandedness has vanished, as members of the press -- who increasingly share the same left-leaning political views and who increasingly live in what Mickey Kaus calls the press "cocoon" -- have let their bias show. In an admirable display of forthrightness, Newsweek's Evan Thomas remarked:

"There's one other base here, the media. Let's talk a little media bias here. The media, I think, wants Kerry to win and I think they're going to portray Kerry and Edwards I'm talking about the establishment media, not Fox. They're going to portray Kerry and Edwards as being young and dynamic and optimistic and there's going to be this glow about them, collective glow, the two of them, that's going to be worth maybe 15 points."

Hmm. A 15-point margin kind of makes a mockery of "democracy" doesn't it? And we were worried about a few hanging chads?

...But the real problem here, to paraphrase a Massachusetts politician who ran for President a few elections back, is not ideology, but competence.

The press's neutrality has been revealed as a fiction. That might not matter if they were still better at what they did than anyone else. After all, what about all the fact-checking, the professionalism, the editors meticulously ensuring fairness and accuracy?

Yeah. What about 'em? It's tempting to point to Jayson Blair, or any of the other media scandals of the past couple of years. (Or, for that matter, to Walter Duranty). But the problem goes even deeper than that. Beyond these major scandals, a combination of laziness, bias, and complacency haunts reporting on all sorts of subjects.

Reynolds takes the time to outline the issue in stark terms as it relates to Kerry and the Swift Boat Vets, specifically the now-infamous Christmas in Cambodia claim. His article cites Jonathan Last's superb piece in the Weekly Standard, which took note of the reaction by several newspapers to the Swift Boat story and how they wanted to cover it... or not cover it, as it were...

DURING THE AUGUST 19 edition of PBS's NewsHour, Tom Oliphant unspooled. "The standard of clear and convincing evidence--and it's easy when you leave out the exculpatory stuff--is what keeps this story in the tabloids," the Boston Globe columnist sputtered, "because it does not meet basic standards." "This story" (shades of "that woman") is the story of the Swift boat veterans who have raised a number of troubling allegations against John Kerry. Sitting across from John O'Neill, coauthor of Unfit for Command and John Kerry's successor as commander of PCF-94 in Vietnam, Oliphant did a fair imitation of Al Gore--sighing, harumphing, and exhaling loudly--whenever O'Neill spoke.

"'Almost conclusive' doesn't cut it in the parts of journalism where I live," Oliphant lectured O'Neill, who graduated first in a class of 554 from the University of Texas Law School and clerked for U.S. Supreme Court justice William Rehnquist. "You haven't come within a country mile of meeting first-grade journalistic standards for accuracy." Watching the media's reaction to the Swift boat controversy, it's clear that many journalists agree with Oliphant.

Two days later, Adam Nagourney paused in the middle of a news story in the New York Times to worry about how campaigns should deal with attacks "in this era when so much unsubstantiated or even false information can reach the public through so many different forums, be it blogs or talk-show radio." In an article in Editor & Publisher, Alison Mitchell, the deputy national editor at the Times, admitted, "I'm not sure that in an era of no-cable television we would even have looked into [the Swift boat story]." James O'Shea, managing editor of the Chicago Tribune, went further: "There are too many places for people to get information. I don't think newspapers can be the gatekeepers anymore--to say this is wrong and we will ignore it. Now we have to say this is wrong and here is why."

...Talk-radio and the blog world covered the Cambodia story obsessively. They reported on border crossings during Vietnam and the differences between Swift boats and PBRs. They also found two other instances of Kerry's talking about his Christmas in Cambodia. Spurred on by the blogs, Fox led the August 9 Special Report with a Carl Cameron story on Kerry's Cambodia discrepancy.

All the while, traditional print and broadcast media tried hard to ignore the story--even as Kerry officially changed his position on his presence in Cambodia. Then on August 19, Kerry went public with his counter assault against Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, and suddenly the story was news. The numbers are fairly striking: Before August 19, the New York Times and Washington Post had each mentioned Swift Boat Veterans for Truth just 8 times; the Los Angeles Times 7 times; the Boston Globe 4 times. The broadcast networks did far less. According to the indefatigable Media Research Center, before Kerry went public, ABC, CBS, and NBC together had done a total of 9 stories on the Swifties. For comparison, as of August 19 these networks had done 75 stories on the accusation that Bush had been AWOL from the National Guard.

After Kerry, the deluge. On August 24, the Washington Post ran three op-eds and an editorial on the Swifties; other papers expanded their coverage as well. But, curiously, they didn't try to play catch-up with the new media in ascertaining the veracity of the Swifties' claims. Instead, they pursued (or rather, repeated) the charge Kerry made: that Bush was behind Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. It was a touch surreal--as it would have been if Democratic national chairman Terry McAuliffe's criticism of Bush's National Guard record had prompted the media to investigate Terry McAuliffe.

O'Shea's comment is perfect for framing the issue in the eyes of the mainstream media -- we have to kill this story, as opposed to letting it wither away and die on its own. There's no consideration for the fact that the Swift Boat Tale may be, you know, accurate.

As Reynolds pointed out, the old media actually reacted, not by correcting its errors, but by trying to prove the story false. They also reacted by getting angry at the new media. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune allowed Powerline bloggers John Hinderaker and Scott Johnson to publish a reasoned editorial entitled "Apocalypse Kerry" earlier this month. Tribune editor Jim Boyd fired back with an editorial entitled "Republican Smear Machine Can't Stand Up to the Facts" that ineffectively refuted many of the points made by the bloggers, cited the old hobbyhorse of Max Cleland getting unfairly slimed, and concluded with this paragraph:

As the old saying goes, "Politics ain't beanbag," but this Republican crew, including Hinderaker and Johnson, take the art of slime-throwing to levels of immorality seldom seen. Voters need to awaken to this tactic, and realize how much contempt it shows for the workings of democracy and for the intelligence they bring to the task of choosing this nation's leaders.

The Powerline boys responded, and basically ripped the heart out of Boyd's screed, point-by-point, as shown in this sample...

First, the basics. We wrote that the Kerry campaign has retracted Kerry's oft-told tale of being in Cambodia on Christmas 1968. Boyd did not dispute this. We wrote that there is no record of John Kerry being in Cambodia in December 1968, or at any other time. Boyd did not dispute this. We wrote that Kerry's commanding officers have denied that he was ever sent into Cambodia. Boyd did not dispute this. We wrote that not a single crewman who ever served with Kerry has supported Kerry's claim to have been in Cambodia, and several crewmen have denied that their boat was ever in Cambodia. Boyd did not dispute this. We wrote that there is no record of Swift boats being used for clandestine missions as claimed by Kerry. Boyd did not dispute this. We wrote that Swift boats were unsuited for such secret missions, given their large size and noise. Boyd did not dispute this.

Gosh, for fraudulent smear artists, we seem to be doing pretty well. Given that he didn't deny any of our main points, what did Boyd have to say? Most importantly, he alleged that Kerry was in Cambodia, but it was in January 1969, not December 1968. Thus, Boyd wrote, ours is an "accurate but niggling criticism." Of course, there is no more evidence for Kerry being in Cambodia in January 1969 than in December 1968.
But when Kerry told his famous story to the Senate in 1986 -- the story that he says was "seared -- seared" into his memory, he was very specific about the timing of his life-altering experience. It was Christmas 1968, and he heard President Richard Nixon denying that we had troops in Cambodia while he himself had been sent there. It was this experience, he said, that caused him to lose his faith in the American government.

We pointed out that Kerry's account was obviously false, since Nixon was not president in December 1968. Boyd responded that Nixon was then president-elect, so Kerry's "discrepancy" was "understandable." Obviously, however, a president-elect was in no position to assure the American people that there were no troops in Cambodia.

We made the relatively minor point that Kerry's claim to have been shot at by the Khmer Rouge is implausible, since they did not take the field until 1972. Boyd said, with no attribution, that "the Khmer Rouge ... began its armed combat against the government of Prince Norhodom Sihanouk in 1967."

We based our statement on the testimony of Andrew Antippas, "the Cambodia Man" at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon between 1968 and 1970, who wrote: "[C]oncerning the assertion that Mr. Kerry was shot at by the Khmer Rouge during his Christmas 1968 visit to Cambodia, it should be noted that the Khmer Rouge didn't take the field until the Easter Offensive of 1972."

Different sources assign different dates to the beginning of military action by the Khmer Rouge, but we've seen no support for the proposition that the Khmer Rouge were in the field (as opposed to existing as a political organization) in January 1969.

Boyd's response, entitled "This year, the political smear is exposed even as it's happening", barely merits reading, save for this gem...

Then along came the Hinderaker-Johnson piece on Kerry. It should have set off all kinds of alarms. As one of the editors responsible for these pages, I regret that it did not -- and that I was not here to weigh in on the decision.

Now comes their second piece. I could do extensive line-by-line analysis, but I will not. It would take space I do not have.

In other words, I can't refute them line-by-line, so I won't even dignify their argument. What's hysterical is that he did try to refute just one of their arguments... and the Powerline boys responded again on their blog, not just once but twice, each time shredding Boyd's credibility further. It must be difficult to get abused this badly in cyber-space, but Boyd refuses to accept challenges from Hinderaker and Johnson to debate them on this issue, preferring to hide behind his editorial column. This, of course, shows what happens when a journalist who's not used to having to defend his opinions squares off with a pair of lawyers, trained in writing persuasive pieces that must also have a relationship to things known as facts. The sublime Hugh Hewitt summarized the issue very nicely...

I have been both a lawyer/law professor for two decades and a television/radio/print journalist for 15 years of those 20. It takes a great deal more intelligence and discipline to be the former than to be the latter, which is why the former usually pays a lot more than the latter. It is no surprise to me, then, when lawyers/law professors... prove to be far more adept at exposing the "Christmas-in-Cambodia" lie and other Kerry absurdities than old-school journalists. The big advantage is in research skills, of course, and in an eye for inconsistencies which make or break cases and arguments. Lawyers turned amateur journalists are going to be much better at it than time-serving scribblers... The only difference between professional and amateur journalists is that the former get paid to practice their trade. As with athletes, the purer effort comes with the amateurs, though some of the pros keep their ideals front and center.

In the end, the new media's encroachment on the old media's territory will only bring good things to Americans. More sources of information and more information overall means the ability to make better decisions. If the information is false, the key is to refute it, not call it names, as Boyd seemed intent on doing. Eventually, the old media may learn this lesson, but not too quickly, as John Podhertz pointed out...

I've been listening to mainstream-media types talk about the terrible threat posed to the news business by one new phenomenon or other since I began my career 22 years ago. The complaint is invariably, and drearily, the same: Whatever is new is bad because it supposedly lowers the historically high standards of the mainstream media.

The last two years in particular have seen the explosion of a new medium — the personal Internet newspaper, or blog — that has already and will forever change the way people get their information.

This is a thrilling development — unless you are a mainstream-media Big Fish.

The success of the Swift-boat vets' ads is the tale of the triumph of the nation's alternative media. The mainstreamers didn't want to touch the story with a 10-foot pole, and they didn't.

But the alternative media did. Amateur reporters and fact-gatherers offered independent substantiation for some of the charges. It turned out the criticisms of the Swifties weren't quite so easily dismissed.

Because there was new information coming out every day, there was more and more to discuss on talk radio and cable news channels. And the story just wouldn't go away, because millions of people were interested in it.

This democratization of the news is clearly a good thing, if only because it increases available sources of information in a democracy.

But it isn't a good thing if you're a proud part of an Establishment whose authority is being eroded and whose control of the marketplace is being successfully challenged.

What these Establishment-media types will never do — what they can never do — is consider the possibility that the 24-hour news cycle and the rise of talk radio and the Internet are all positive developments.

And I would argue they can't consider that possibility — not only because their platforms are slowly sliding into the quicksand, but because these alternative phenomena have been of great benefit to conservative ideas, anti-liberal attitudes and Republican politicians.

They hate the Swift-boat story. Hate it with a passion. Some of it's based in genuine conviction. Some of it's patently ideological. And some of it's based in fear. They are worried the bell is beginning to toll for them, and they're right.

Don't worry, guys. People will still buy papers for the classifieds. For now.