Very few people get it. Even John Dean, who exposed the corruption in the Nixon administration in 1973 with his Watergate testimony and who now is exposing the moral bankruptcy of today’s Republican Party with his new book, “Conservatives Without Conscience”, appears not to understand the corruption of today’s corporate news media.

In a chapter entitled “Troubling Politics and Policies of Our Authoritarian Government”, following 15 pages that describe how Congressional Republicans have subverted our legislative process, Dean turns to the question of why Democrats haven’t complained about this. The answer he is given by Democrats is that they are concerned that the American public won’t care about this issue and that they (the Democrats) will sound like whining losers if they complain. Dean challenges this assessment by Democrats, quoting Robert Kuttner as follows:


Well, that was nearly a century ago, and perhaps in those days we had a national news media who felt that it was their job to investigate national scandals that involve the way our government operates (in contrast to national scandals that involve a politician’s private sex life.) That reference to 1910 makes it appear that Dean is oblivious to the state of today’s corporate news media.

The plain truth of the matter is that Democrats are probably correct that the American public doesn’t care much about this issue, and they will be made to sound like whining losers if they complain about it. But that isn’t because Americans don’t care about how their government is run. Rather, it’s a reflection on the way that today’s corporate news media likes to portray Democrats whenever they ‘get out of line’ by challenging the current status quo.

Few people take me seriously when I say this, but I maintain that with adequate and neutral press coverage during the Presidential elections of 2000 and 2004, both Al Gore and John Kerry would have won with record landslides – despite the election fraud that occurred in those years. And I believe that’s an understatement.

In 2000, Bush would have been asked to explain how his tax cut proposals could benefit anyone other than the top one or two percent of wage earners in the United States. Attempts by Bush to parrot the talking points he was given by his handlers would have been met by tough questions, which would have made him look like the blabbering idiot that he is. Then, if the press had treated his utter failure to offer a comprehensive explanation for the economic plan at the center of his candidacy with half the seriousness with which they had treated Bill Clinton’s sex scandal, Bush’s candidacy would have sunk like a lead balloon.

In 2004, Bush would have been asked to explain why his administration manipulated intelligence to provide an excuse for war in Iraq, why he lied to the American people about the reasons for that war, and about the hundreds of unanswered questions regarding his lack of preparation for the attacks of 9-11, as well as the failure of his administration to respond to those attacks on the day that they occurred. No amount of preparation could have prepared him to provide intelligible and satisfying answers to those questions. And again, if the national news media had treated these issues as they deserved to be treated, rather than repeated over and over again how “Churchillian” or “Lincolnesque” Bush sounds whenever he opens his mouth on these subjects, it’s difficult for me to see how he could have obtained double digit numbers on Election Day.

And these examples are just for starters. With a competent and neutral press there would have been many other revelations about George W. Bush that would have made it very difficult for him to achieve double digit numbers on Election Day, let alone win an election.

There are several excellent books available now on how today’s national news media has failed to do its job, tilted way right, and become a defender of the status quo, rather than a watch dog of government excesses. I have read several of these books because I believe that this is perhaps the biggest problem that threatens our democracy today (along with election fraud and money in politics, all which are closely related). Three of the best of these books that I have ever read – on any subject – are “Into the Buzzsaw – Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press” edited by Kristina Borjesson, “What Liberal Media? – The Truth About Bias and the News” by Eric Alterman, and “Lapdogs – How the Press Rolled Over for Bush” by Eric Boehlert.

Between them, those three books provide about a hundred detailed examples to make their points. In this post I will summarize just two of them, parallel and contrasting examples that make it crystal clear how the national news media loaded the dice to facilitate Bush’s “victory” in 2004: How it treated the issue of George Bush’s National Guard duty and the parallel issue of how it treated challenges to John Kerry’s war record.


National news media treatment of George Bush’s National Guard Duty

A brief time line of relevant events concerning Bush’s Air National Guard duty
The two most important controversies surrounding Bush’s service in the Air National Guard (ANG) concern how he got admitted to the ANG and whether or not he fulfilled his commitment. I will deal primarily with the latter. Here is a brief timeline of the relevant events, none of which is disputed, which I put together mostly from the events documented in Eric Boehlert’s “Lapdogs” and a Wikipedia article:

1968: Bush was awarded a slot in the Texas ANG, thus relieving him of the likelihood of being sent to fight in Viet Nam. Despite the fact that these slots were highly competitive and Bush had no “background qualifications” (he wrote “none” on his application form) and even had a police record, Bush was commissioned as a second lieutenant.

May 24, 1972: Bush requests transfer to 9921 Air Reserve Squadron in Montgomery, AL, under command of Lt. Col. Reese Bricken. Bricken accepted the transfer, but with reservations, noting that Bush would not be able to fulfill his flying requirements because “We were only a postal unit. We had no airplanes. We had no pilots.”

July 21, 1972: Air Reserve Personnel Center In Denver rejected Bush’s request for transfer to Bricken’s command on the grounds that he would not be able to perform his flying requirements there.

July, 1972: Bush fails to take his annual physical exam, which is required of pilots.

September 5, 1972: Bush requests transfer to 187th Tactical Recon Group at Dannelly AFB, to perform “equivalent duties”, under command of Lt. Col. William Turnipseed. Request is approved on September 15th, and Bush is ordered to report for duty in October 1972.

September 29, 1972: Bush is formally grounded for failing to take his physical exam. He was ordered to acknowledge that in writing, which he never did.

May 2, 1973: Bush receives annual performance review (covering May 1, 1972 to April 30, 1973) from his superiors at the Texas ANG at Ellis AFB, Houston, stating simply that Bush had not been observed at his assigned base in Texas.

June 29, 1973: Air Reserve Personnel Center (Denver) instructed (See 3rd to last bullet point) Bush’s commanders to get additional information from Alabama, where he had supposedly trained, in order to better evaluate Bush’s duty.

Did Bush show up at Dannelly AFB to fulfill his commitment, or was he AWOL?
The main controversy concerns whether or not Bush fulfilled his commitment to the ANG at Dannelly AFB in Alabama, where he was eventually assigned.

Evidence against his having done that is that there are no records recording such service, none of the 600 guardsmen who served at Dannelly during the time period in question ever came forward to corroborate his story, and his commander there, Lt. Col. Turnipseed, as well as the personnel officer there, told the Boston Globe that Bush never showed up (though Turnipseed retracted that statement years later). Also, how could Bush perform “equivalent duties” if he was grounded from flying status?

Evidence provided by the Bush camp to confirm that he did indeed fulfill his commitment at Dannelly included the fact that decades later his ex-girl friend confirmed that he talked about his activities at Dannelly, and the fact that Bush was honorably discharged from the ANG.

The controversy over Dan Rather’s 60 Minutes segment involving the Killian memos
The Killian memos controversy that brought down Dan Rather involved documents that Rather used in his 60 Minutes segment in September 2004, purported to have been signed by Bush’s (by then deceased) commanding officer at Ellis AFB in Houston, Lt. Col. Jerry Killian. Killian allegedly wrote in these memos that he had ordered Bush to take his physical exam, that he had grounded Bush for failure to perform adequately and for failure to take his physical exam, that Bush had requested to be excused from further ANG duties while in Alabama, and that Killian had been pressured to go easy on Bush.

Rather and 60 Minutes were discredited when it was shown that the Killian memos were not proven to be authentic. Whether or not they actually were authentic was never resolved. Killian’s secretary claimed that the content of the memos was correct.

What is essential to understand about this is that, potentially damning as those memos were, they were not in any way needed to answer the central question of whether or not Bush had fulfilled his ANG commitment in Alabama. That Bush was grounded for failure to take his physical exam is a documented fact. And whether or not Bush requested Killian that he be excused from further duties, and whether or not Killian was pressured to go easy on Bush are not directly pertinent to the central question of whether or not Bush showed up at Dannelly AFB to fulfill his ANG commitment.

Press coverage
Following the initial report in the Boston Globe of Bush’s apparent failure to fulfill his ANG duties, the national news media showed very little interest in the subject. The was a total of only two articles in U.S. newspapers, magazines or television in 2000 that dealt with both Bush’s absenteeism and the allegations by Ben Barnes that strings had been pulled to get Bush into the ANG. In contrast, during the same time period, there were 4,800 references to the phony story that Al Gore claimed to have invented the internet.

In 2004, when the story was even more relevant, due to Bush’s commitment to a war in Iraq based on the twisting of intelligence data, there was still very little interest in getting to the bottom of Bush’s ANG absenteeism. Yet when it was shown that the Killian memos could not be proven to be authentic, the national news media treated that like it was a national scandal and pretended as if that failure to prove the authenticity of the Killian memos exonerated Bush’s ANG service record. For example, in 2000 the New York Times published only two references to the Globe investigation into Bush’s absenteeism. But in 2004, following the Killian memos “scandal”, the Times published more than 40 articles on that subject.


The swift boating of John Kerry

The vigorous national news media coverage of the phony challenges to John Kerry’s service record in Vietnam, right before the 2004 election, provides a striking contrast to the virtual absence of any interest in the legitimate story of Bush’s ANG service.

Whereas the main doubts raised about Bush’s ANG service came from official ANG records, and whereas John Kerry’s heroic Vietnam war record, including three Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star, were all part of his official record AND were corroborated by ALL of the crewmates who were witnesses to the actions that earned Kerry his medals, the challenges to Kerry’s war record were all based on the accusations of men who refused to sign affidavits testifying to their accusations and whose accusations were internally inconsistent and contradicted all available evidence.

Let’s consider the legitimacy of the challenges to Kerry’s Vietnam War record by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (SWVT) by looking at some examples:

On the credibility of the accusations of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth
Alfred French accused Kerry of receiving his Purple Heart for “self-inflicted wounds in the absence of hostile fire”, but later had to admit that he had no first hand knowledge of that, as his accusations were based on what he had heard from “friends”.

George Elliott, Kerry’s commanding officer, had given Kerry nothing but glowing performance reports, but after hooking up with SBVT in 2004, he offered scathing criticisms of Kerry’s performance, then changed his mind, saying that he had made a “terrible mistake”, and then changed his story again.

Regarding the Purple Heart that Kerry received for his December 2, 1968 actions, Dr. Louis Letson claimed that he had treated Kerry’s wounds the next day, and that they were “insignificant”. But Letson’s name was not listed in the records as the “person administering treatment”.

William Schachte claims that he was with Kerry on December 2, 1968, and that there was no enemy fire that night. But two crew members who were with Kerry that night say that they were under enemy fire and that Schachte was not there.

Larry Thurlowe, who commanded the swift boat alongside Kerry’s boat on March 13, 1969, the day that Kerry won his third Purple Heart and his Bronze Star for rescuing James Rassmann at grave risk to his own life, claims that there was no enemy fire that day. But Thurlow himself won a Bronze Star on that day, based on the fact that there was enemy fire.

John O’Neill, the leader of SBVT, says that there were no bullet holes in any of the boats involved in the fighting of March 13, despite an official report that notes three bullet holes in one of the boats. And in response the question of how he knew that Kerry wrote the allegedly false after-action report that won him the Bronze Star, O’Neill said that Kerry’s initials were on the report. Then, when it was pointed out that the initials on the report were KJW, O’Neill claimed that Kerry went by those initials.

Press coverage
Despite the fact that all official documents substantiated Kerry’s heroism, the fact that all of the crew members who served with Kerry and the man whose life he saved corroborated those official accounts, and despite all of the inconsistencies in the undocumented stories of the SBVT, the national news media treated the accusations of the “Swifties” very seriously in the months before the 2004 election.

CNN mentioned the stories in almost 300 news segments. The New York Times printed more than 100 articles on the subject. And the Washington Post ran 12 front page stories on the accusations of the Swifties during a 12 day period in August 2004.

An example of the hypocrisy with which the national news media lent legitimacy to the story is provided by an episode of Meet the Press, where Tim Russert innocently asked a guest, “If the substance of many of the charges from “Unfit for Command” (the book that O’Neill used to assassinate Kerry’s war record) aren’t holding up… why is it resonating so much?” Duh, Tim. It’s resonating because media whores like you keep talking about it as if it was a legitimate story, without discussing the numerous holes in it.


Motivations

Thus, in 2004 the national news media treated obviously phony stories that trashed the war record of a legitimate war hero as if they were legitimate news stories, while at the same time virtually ignoring legitimate accounts of George Bush’s failure to fulfill his Air National Guard requirements. The result was to make the non-war record of the shirker appear to be equal to or even better than the war record of the war hero.

Eric Boehlert does a great job of exposing this and numerous other outrages perpetrated by our national news media in recent years in “Lapdogs”. Yet, I found his diagnosis of the motivations for this abject failure by our national corporate news media to be very perplexing. Throughout his book Boehlert attributes this failure to timidity, continuously repeating his opinion that the corporate media is constantly bullied by Republican operatives and their fans, and that that explains why they do everything in their power to protect George Bush and to skewer Democrats. The last sentence of his book sums up this viewpoint: “Afraid of the facts and the consequences of reporting them, the MSM still had not found their bearings during the Bush years.”

But the MSM is owned by a small number of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the world. Why should anyone think that they’re “timid”? Isn’t it more logical to postulate that their so-called “failures” in reporting the news are not a failures at all, but rather represents a concentrated and consistent purposeful attempt to slant the news in a way that will maintain the status quo and facilitate their interests?

The individual reporters who work for these giant news conglomerates know where their bread is buttered. They know what’s going on when Phil Donohue is fired for talking against the Iraq War. Or when Bill Moyers is repeatedly attacked for his “liberal bias” because he tells the truth about the Bush administration. Or when Dan Rather, along with those involved in the Killian memo “scandal” at CBS are fired for daring to make a mistake while criticizing George Bush – a mistake that pales in comparison with the mistakes that our national news media repeatedly makes on behalf of George Bush.


Solutions

If and when the Democrats take control of Congress and/or the Presidency, they need to make a major priority out of re-establishing laws and policies that will reverse the control of our national news media by a small number of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the world. The measures to enforce the Fairness Doctrine that Reagan vetoed in 1987 need to be enacted into law, and the Telecommunications Act of 1996 needs to be repealed.

But what can they do prior to that? I’m certainly not politically savvy enough to answer that question, but it seems to me that Democrats for a long time have been very reluctant to rock the boat too much, for fear that the corporate media will turn against them – as noted in the first four paragraphs of this post. They are right to fear this. It is not only a possibility that the corporate media will turn against them if they complain about the status quo, rather it is a near certainty. Look what happened to Cynthia McKinney for daring to question too aggressively Bush’s handling of the 9-11 attacks.

But Democrats should recognize that the corporate news media is already against them. And perhaps, rather than sitting back and taking it, they should attack the corporate media itself. I don’t mean that they should go around spouting rhetoric against the corporate media in their campaign speeches. But whenever media whores like Chris Matthews or Nora O’Donnell or Tim Russert spout off their lies and distortions under the guise of objective journalism, the Democrats ought to be well prepared and waiting for them, with a cache of arguments that will show up those whores for who they are.

Faced with a national news media like the one we have now, which is determined to either move Democrats to the right or to bury them, Democrats have basically two choices. They can either obey the wishes of the corporate media, or that can fight back. I believe that Americans are more than fed up with what has been going on in our country, and most of them will respond positively to a Democratic Party that fights back against corporate news media whores whenever it is appropriate to do so. If that happens we just may see a real landslide this November.