Posted 9:28 AM by steve

It's day two of the WaPo's coverage of the Swiftboats Vets controversy. By that I mean the Post reports on the front page (in order) Kerry's attack on Bush "Kerry Says Group Is a Front For Bush", that the Swiftboat Vets are "Republican-funded", Kerry's strategy on dealing with this "When you're under attack, the best thing to do is turn your boat into the attack", and that Kerry has made "his military service a centerpiece of his candidacy".

Only inside the paper, and in 2 short paragraphs, does the paper touch on the charges the Swiftboat vets have levied against Kerry. The Post mentions "Christmas in Cambodia", but does so in a way that treats the matter as almost an afterthought "that he lied about crossing into Cambodia on Christmas Eve 1968". Nothing about the number of times Kerry had made that claim, nothing about how he had claimed the memory was 'seared' into his memory, nothing about how the Kerry team has had to pull back from that claim and nothing about how Kerry has already been proven to have lied about his service in Vietnam. As for the other charges the group has made against Kerry, the Post has merely "...has also accused Kerry of lying about his war record to win...., charges the Democratic nominee denies" and "On it's Web site, the veteran's group says that the wound that led to the first of Kerry's first three Purple Hearts was minor and self-inflicted, thus ineligible for the award". Out of about 30 paragraphs, the Post uses A TOTAL OF ABOUT 50 WORDS TO REPORT THE CHARGES AGAINST KERRY. The rest of the article is given to portraying the group as Republican-backed, all-but accusing Bush of being behind the ad, reporting on how the Kerry camp is dealing with the controversy, and a bit on how this may be hurting Kerry with veterans.

But that's okay, you might think, wouldn't the Post have covered the specifics of the charges in previous editions? Actually, no. In yesterday's Post, they have another front page article "Records Counter a Critic of Kerry", which, per the title, has much on the attempt to discredit Kerry's accuser (Thurlow and Elliot in particular, and by extension, all of them, and all of us), a bit on one particular charge (that his critics claim that Kerry's boat was not under fire, as Kerry has claimed), and nothng on the other charges the group has levied against Kerry. You have to go back a week, to an editorial on August 12 to find any real detail on these charges. And, in a hint (as if we need one) of their view on the whole matter, they titled their editorial "Swift Boat Smears".

Well, you might say, that's okay, the Post didn't give much play to the unproven allegations that Bush was AWOL during his National Guard Service, did they? No, unless you consider Bush's Guard Service In Question, Many Gaps In Bush's Guard Records, and Some Democrats urge caution on issue of Bush's National Guard service, among others, as evidence that the Washington Post sure gave the charges against Bush much more of an airing thta they've given the charges levied against Kerry. But do we really expect any different from them?

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