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

To: LindyBill who wrote (81636)	10/29/2004 7:04:09 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793625

HAPPY HOLLOWEEN! blackfive.net

To: LindyBill who wrote (81636)	10/29/2004 8:04:37 AM
From: Sig	Respond to of 793625

<<<Brokaw: The flip side of that is that if you had been president, Saddam Hussein would still be in power. Because you... Kerry: Not necessarily at all. Brokaw: But you have said you wouldn't go to war against him...>>> Thanks for clearing that up, Kerry may have gone to war but then again.... He is a liberal and also a conservative at the same time.? Such tallent should not be wasted. He could replace Arafat. He has sent men to prison?. Another Kerry lie, he did not send them to prison- a judge did that. At least I hope so, or our system has failed. <<< I led the fight to put 100,000 cops on the streets of America. What does that make me?>> It makes you a tax and spend democrat who is spending a hell of a lot of taxpayers money to bring big brother right into everybodies home town whether they asked for it or not. <<<Brokaw: Someone has analyzed the President's military aptitude tests and yours, and concluded that he has a higher IQ than you do. Kerry: That's great. More power. I don't know how they've done it, because my record is not public. So I don't know where you're getting that from. >>> His record is not public. His record is not public.? And he is complaining about Bush's records which are public. What a guy!!! And now he is trying to get on the good side of Dick Gephardt the same way he did with Cheney? Sig

To: LindyBill who wrote (81636)	10/29/2004 8:08:56 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793625

Cheering from the press box? Chicago Tribune Editorial October 28, 2004 The story rocked America's presidential campaign when The New York Times broke it Monday: "Huge Cache of Explosives Vanished From Site in Iraq." Within a day, Sen. John Kerry's campaign had a new ad that depicted the Times' story and said President Bush "failed to secure" the explosives after the U.S.-led invasion last year. That reminded us of an old bromide in the news business: Beware the damning story that breaks in the final days before an election. Chances are it didn't surface then by accident. On Tuesday, syndicated columnist Linda Chavez faulted her colleagues in the news media for not investigating "truly startling evidence unearthed this week that the Communist Party may have been directing John Kerry's anti-war activities in the early 1970s." As proof, Chavez cited captured communist records now held by the Vietnam Center at Texas Tech University. Wow! Loose weapons and commie puppeteers! Life wasn't this scary when (you choose) Ronald Reagan/Bill Clinton was in charge. Late-breaking mud, often stirred to a sticky thickness by partisan leakers of news tips, is a staple of presidential campaigns. This year, though, a mudslide of charges is oozing into print and broadcast reports. It has tended to reinforce the perception among some Americans that many journalists are rooting for Kerry. No, we're not going to skip down that path holding hands with Rush Limbaugh. But it's harder to refute those suspicions when CBS, which reported the weapons story cooperatively with the Times, acknowledges that it originally planned to break the scoop on "60 Minutes" this Sunday--two days before the election. Had that occurred, many voters wouldn't have had time to learn about Monday's follow-up report from NBC, which had a reporter embedded with U.S. troops who arrived at the weapons site in question one day after the fall of Baghdad--and who didn't observe those 380 tons of high explosives. Could Saddam Hussein have moved his stockpile? Nor would many voters have learned two points that add crucial perspective: first, that 400,000 tons of Hussein's munitions have been captured or destroyed by coalition troops, and second, that the recent Duelfer report on Iraqi arms puts the number of Hussein's weapons caches at more than 10,000. The bottom line: It's not yet clear that the explosives were even present when U.S. troops arrived. The lesson here is that news embarrassing to any candidate is hard to evaluate when there's little time to investigate the facts. Nailing down the status of specific explosives in a war zone--like assessing claims about old documents from Vietnam--usually takes far more resources than the last few days of a campaign allow. Of course, that's precisely why candidates seize on last-minute news that muddies the other guy. So, what are voters to think? Does the media attention given the explosives story, despite its crucial unanswered questions, suggest that reporters assigned to cover the race evenhandedly are cheering for Kerry from the press box? A study of campaign reporting released Tuesday won't dampen that suspicion. The Washington-based Project for Excellence in Journalism, after examining reports in several major news outlets (not including the Tribune) from Oct. 1 to 14, concluded that 59 percent of the stories about Bush were negative in tone, while 25 percent of the stories about Kerry were negative. Of course, had that inquiry been done while stories about the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and their jihad against Kerry dominated campaign news, the results might well have been reversed. In July, Newsweek Assistant Managing Editor Evan Thomas stirred a small ruckus in the news business with his blunt assertion on television's "Inside Washington" that coverage tilted in favor of Kerry and running mate John Edwards in the national media "is going to be worth maybe 15 [percentage] points" on Election Day. Thomas has since downscaled his estimate to 5 points. But conservative blogs still quote his point lavishly. Bush partisans also cite evidence from last spring's survey by the non-partisan Pew Research Center, which found that at national news organizations, self-described liberals outnumber conservatives by almost 5-1. Conservatives used that diversity-challenged ratio as evidence of an unlevel playing field after CBS relied on evidently forged documents for a critical report on Bush's military record. They also decry the failure of some news outlets to challenge Kerry's assertion that Bush has banned embryonic stem cell research. In truth, the president only limited the scope of government funding for that research; privately funded scientists can freely pursue it. And the Bushies find it curious that so few news shops are covering the Oil-for-Food scandal. That disgraced United Nations program helped Hussein plunder billions to prop up his murderous regime. Wouldn't covering Oil-for-Food, the Bushies ask, help prove that a corrupt UN didn't want war with Iraq to disrupt lucrative payoffs in France, Russia and many other countries? For news consumers, blaming reporters for turning last-minute leaks into unflattering stories is one option. The better option is to realize that most journalists want to chase potentially important stories whenever they occur. Best to pay attention, even in the closing days of a campaign, but with a grain of salt close by. Remember, when the embarrassing story breaks late, there's usually a reason. Copyright © 2004, Chicago Tribune