The Kerry campaign did work closely with the major dailies, feeding documents to The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Boston Globe to debunk the Swift Boat vets. The articles were mostly (though not entirely) supportive of Kerry, but it was too late. The old media may have been more responsible than the new media, but they were also largely irrelevant.
Isn't it amazing that this Newsweek article never asks why, if the Swift Vet charges were lies, Kerry didn't lay the charges to rest by releasing his records? In fact, the article never mentions the question of unreleased records at all, except for the diary entries about meeting with the North Vietnamese.
And let's not mention the extent to which the MSM articles actually debunked the Swiftvet charges, as opposed to declaring that the charges had been debunked. The author doesn't mention the NYT article declaring a "web of connections" between the Swift Vets and the RNC just because the Swift Vets took money from a Republican donor and shared a lawyer with the RNC - just as America Coming Together did on the Democratic side.
Even now, in the post-mortem, they can't admit that not to raise the question of unreleased records, at the very same time they were pounding Bush about his National Guard records, was obviously coddling Kerry. |
