Truth - Al Franken [28]
Let me see if I can explain myself with a little conciseness here, but make the point about what’s happened to my business.
Take the first Purple Heart. There’s a guy in the first TV commercial who says, “I know he’s lying about that because I treated him.” Say a guy like that walks into your office in a newspaper, and he says, “I got this story for you. I treated John Kerry for that wound, and he’s lying about what happened.”
And you say, “Well, Jesus, that’s interesting, guy. What do you got? Anybody else back you up? You got some corroboration?”
“Well, no.”
Tom’s even voice had grown soft. Soft, with an edge.
“How about a document? You treated him. You know, maybe there’s a piece of paper that says, gee, you treated him.”
“Well, no. I don’t have a document. There is this document, but it says somebody else treated him.”
I laughed. That was funny. But Tom’s eyes were burning.
Now, at that point, the way I was raised: “Thank you very much for coming in.”
Tom pointed toward the door of the studio, as if to invite the imaginary Swift Boat Liar to get the hell out.
You know, we’ve put a million stories in our wastebaskets over the years, because they don’t . . . check . . . out.
Today, we publish, or we broadcast, the mere fact of the accusation, regardless of whether it’s filled with helium.
Tom invested the word “fact” with all the scorn he could muster.
That’s what’s changed in our business. We served as transmission belts for this stuff without ever inquiring into its accuracy.
“How did this happen?”
That was me. As a professional radio host, I’ve learned to ask open-ended, rather than “yes-or-no” questions. It’s a trick of the trade.
Tom responded concisely. More in anger than in sadness.
Because that’s the way the news business runs now.
Tom’s face was red and his bow tie practically vertical. No, it was spinning. And his face was purple like a beet. I hope I’ve illustrated the extent of his anger through these metaphors.
Anyway, the point is Tom was pissed off.
It was August 26. The book Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry had topped the best-seller list for three weeks. The Republican National Convention was about to start. We had that to look forward to. For weeks, political news coverage had been dominated by “the mere fact of the accusation.” The mainstream media had finally begun doing what they should never have had to do—debunk the scurrilous charges that Kerry had not earned his military decorations in Vietnam. They never should have had to debunk these charges because the charges should never have been given any play in the first place. The charge that Bush had been involved in a series of chainsaw massacres while serving as governor of Texas didn’t get any coverage in the 2000 election. That charge was equally untrue and equally unworthy of coverage. But the treatment it received was very different.1
The responsible newspapers did eventually jump on the debunk wagon. On August 20, the LA Times put it pretty simply: “Military documents and accounts of crewmates who did serve with Kerry support the view put forth by the candidate and his campaign—that he acted courageously and came by his five medals honestly.” Two days later, the Washington Post carried a 4,100-word opus under the headline “Swift Boat Accounts Incomplete; Critics Fail to Disprove Kerry’s Version of Vietnam War Episode.” And the same week, The New York Times moved the story further by exposing the incestuous relationship between the supposedly non-Bushrun Swift Boat Vets and their slutty older sisters in the Rove-run Bush campaign:
A series of interviews and a review of documents show a web of connections to the Bush family, high-profile Texas political figures, and President Bush’s chief political