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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jack Hartmann who wrote (29258)	2/12/2004 9:15:20 PM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793978

Hugh Hewitt - Across the country today Beltway political pros, reporters and pundits were talking about one issue and one issue only --off air. But while the radio hosts openly discussed the accusations swirling around John Kerry that first surfaced at the Drudge Report, television talking heads stayed far away from the story. Incredibly, Judy Woodruff did not ask Wesley Clark about the allegation that the retired general had himself launched the allegations into play! Over at Editor&Publisher the question is "Will Press Pounce on Drudge's Kerry Rumor?" Of course, "the press" will. The real question is whether they will tell the public before the information is irrelevant. This reluctance to discuss on air what they are all chatting about off air is both a relic and transparently hypocritical. The days of a media elite deciding which stories the public got to know and those which had to be held back are long gone. Recall that the Los Angeles Times tried to burn Arnold by holding its slam piece on him until days before the California recall election. There the manipulation was in timing the drop. With the Kerry story, if there is anything to the allegations, the release should be immediate so that their is no manipulation of the primary cycle to stick the Dems with a wounded duck. The two spokesmen interviewed by E&P, the AP's Jack Stokes and the Washington Post's Leonard Downie, wouldn't confirm that investigations into Kerry's fidelity to his wife were even underway. Even more interesting: Will the standard of proof attaching to any Kerry statement on the subject be the same as the standard being applied to President Bush's record of service in the Air National Guard, where no combination of statements, records, and third party testimony is sufficient to satisfy the swamp dwellers with a political interest in keeping the story alive? Once again there will be a standard established by the left which the left will resist applying to its own candidate. Calpundit, consumed by the details of dental records and the like these past few days, has at least mentioned the odd silence of the Kerry campaign and the media. No word from Beltway insider Joshua Micah Marshall, leading me to conclude that Sydney Blumenthal hasn't yet been told by the Clintons how to respond. In the age of the internet, blogging and Fox News, however, the glaring inconsistencies of the media's coverage of its favorites and its foes are quickly noted and absorbed by the public. A very amusing few days ahead