Abstract

'We Lie. We Decide.'

This editorial focuses on the media's questioning of U.S. Senator John Kerry's war record leading up to the 2004 presidential election. Tim Russert is questioning John Kerry about his 1971 Senate testimony, in which Kerry recounted testimony he had heard of war crimes committed in Vietnam by US troops at the so-called Winter Soldier Investigation in January/February of that year. The fact that such crimes were committed by US troops is indisputable. The entire exchange is therefore purposely pointless -- both gratuitous and nonsensical -- except as a means to try to embarrass Kerry for having had the courage to testify to uncomfortable truth more than thirty years earlier. The exchange flashed again into my mind as I read that Russert -- who, lest we forget, is one of the two or three most influential and respected journalists on network television -- had reportedly told viewers that the dishonest and morally disgusting Swift Boat Veterans for Truth advertisements that have now been fully discredited had "scored a direct hit on one of the main bases for the Kerry campaign, his war record." It did not matter to this grand pooh-bah of the punditocracy that the ads were pure mendacity from start to finish. What mattered is that they were "effective." But why were they effective? Because Russert and his colleagues had not the wherewithal to point out that they were lies.