David Broder, Heal Thyself

David Broder worries that the media has lost its credibility.

We don't yet know who will win the 2004 election, but we know who has lost it. The American news media have been clobbered.

If Broder wants to know what ails the mainstream media, he need not read any further than his next paragraph.

In a year when war in Iraq, the threat of terrorism and looming problems with the federal budget and the nation's health care system cry out for serious debate, the news organizations on which people should be able to depend have been diverted into chasing sham events: a scurrilous and largely inaccurate attack on the Vietnam service of John Kerry and a forged document charging President Bush with disobeying an order for an Air National Guard physical.

Please tell me Mr. Broder - which of the Swift Boat Veterans' charges are scurrilous and inaccurate. To my knowledge, not one has been discredited and Kerry has all but admintted that they were correct in at least five of their accusattions. His was not the only boat stay in the battle zone to rescue John Rassmun. In fact, Broder's own paper found that Kerry's was the only boat to flee the scene, running perhaps a full mile, before returning to give help the other boats that never did leave the disabled boat behind. And Kerry has not yet managed to reconcile his claim that he rescued Rassmun under heavy fire with the absence of bullet holes in any of the 5 boats involved. Kerry was never in Cambodia on a secret mission. Period.
Kerry really did shoot an already wounded Viet Cong in the back, the episode that "won" him the Silver Star. Incidentally, he has not yet explained his "combat V." He has admitted that his first purple heart was likely a self inflicted wound. And, his third purple heart was self inflicted a well, when he blew up a civilian rice bin and took shrapnel is his butt because he didnt' get far enough away before the grenades exploded. It seems to me that the Swift Boat Vets record of accuracy greatly exceeds Kerry's.

The problem with the media is precisely what Broder demonstrated in this column - arrogance and a blinding leftwing bias.