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Gandalf Grey
Guest
The press manufactures John Kerry's tears
By Eric Boehlert
Created Jan 31 2007 - 9:35am
The Barack Obama madrassa hoax [0] isn't the only recent, dishonest campaign
story that deserves close scrutiny. Another, perhaps even more disturbing,
press deception revolved around Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) and the announcement
he made from the floor of the Senate on January 24 that he would not run for
president in 2008. Disturbing, because the fraud did not involve Fox News or
the right-wing InsightMag.com but instead was driven by mainstream media
outlets.
Kerry's speech, which was mocked in the press for being poorly stage managed
(it was too wordy, pundits complained), was also badly mangled by scores of
major news players who concocted the phony storyline that Kerry had shed
tears of regret while announcing his plans to sit out the 2008 race.
Kerry did no such thing, but reporters and pundits went ahead and
manufactured the narrative that the "emotional" and "choked up" senator
became "tearful" as he publicly "let go of his White House dreams." None of
that was accurate. Kerry did become temporarily emotional, but not while he
was discussing his political ambitions.
Granted, the incident was relatively minor, and Kerry himself is no longer
the Democratic Party's standard bearer, which likely explains why the
dishonest coverage of his speech received so little attention. But for
observers who want to understand the media's mindset as the next White House
run unfolds, they'd be hard-pressed to find a more telling and alarming
example than the coverage surrounding Kerry's straightforward proclamation
last week.
Indeed, the incident raises all sorts of doubts, on the eve of the 2008
campaign, about the ability of Beltway journalists to perform the simplest
tasks, such as taking notes when a prominent Democrat gives a speech and
then accurately reporting on that speech.
Not surprisingly, the nasty Kerry narrative was launched last week by Matt
Drudge who posted [0] the wildly inaccurate headline "Kerry Tears on Senate
Floor," which in turn linked to a misleading Financial Times report about
Kerry's speech. The FT article incorrectly reported [0] that Kerry had been
"choking back tears" as he spelled out his campaign plans.
Adopting Drudgespeak, journalists quickly echoed misinformation about
Kerry's presidential announcement:
a.. The Boston Globe painted a very dramatic picture [0], labeling Kerry
"tearful." The paper emphasized that Kerry, "choked back tears on the Senate
floor" as he made his statement.
b.. The dispatch from Connecticut's Hartford Courant was even more vivid
[0], with readers informed that Kerry teetered on an emotional breakdown:
"Choking back tears, he could barely get out the words."
c.. The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz emphasized, "The Massachusetts
senator, his voice breaking, disclosed that he would, in fact, not be a
candidate for president in the next election."
d.. MSNBC's Tucker Carlson mocked [0] Kerry's "teary" campaign speech and
told viewers it was "sad to watch John Kerry cry up there today."
e.. Roger Simon, a columnist for the newly minted Beltway news outlet
Politico, wrote [0] that Kerry "tearfully" bowed out of the 2008 race.
f.. The New York Daily News reported [0] an "emotional" Kerry had been
"choking up a little as he let go of his White House dreams."
g.. A New York Sun editorial [0] reported, "Senator Kerry had to choke
back tears as he announced, on the floor of the Senate, the end of his long
quest for the presidency."
Not one of those descriptions was accurate.
For the record, at no point did Kerry shed any tears on the floor of the
Senate last Wednesday; he simply did not "cry." Rather, during a single
sentence Kerry became emotional and his voice caught. The press' key
distortion though, was that the single sentence had nothing to do with
running for president again. Instead, Kerry was momentarily overcome with
emotion when he noted that the misguided war in Iraq threatened to undo
everything he had fought for since his return from Vietnam more than three
decades ago.
As The Chicago Tribune's political blog, The Swamp, accurately noted [0],
"It was when Kerry talked about coming home from Vietnam that he choked up."
Still, members of the press blissfully manufactured the storyline suggesting
the senator shed tears of self-pity over his dashed presidential hopes.
This is the kind of trickery one would expect from right-wing bloggers,
anxious to manufacture [0] any sort of slight to embarrass a former
Democratic presidential candidate. But why would members of the mainstream
press corps stoop to such depths as fictionalizing the account of Kerry's
speech? Either journalists who reported on and pontificated about the speech
didn't actually witness it (a distinct possibility), or they simply decided
to improve the narrative and bump up the drama by literally inventing the
"fact" that Kerry was "tearful," a false description that appeared in the
very first sentence of the Boston Globe article.
Again, here's the video [0] of Kerry's Senate speech. Watch it. (Fast
forward to the 29-minute mark if you want to see only the final six minutes,
which is where the news was made.) See for yourself that when discussing his
campaign decision Kerry's voice was clear and forceful, not "choked up" or
"emotional." See also that at no point did the senator become "tearful."
Does the press even take campaigns seriously?
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) last week talked about wanting to have a
real dialogue with the American people during her White House campaign. I'm
sure she's not alone among White House aspirants. But you know what, Al Gore
wanted to have a real dialogue in 2000 and so did Kerry in 2004, yet the
campaign press corps was more interested in catcalls [0] about whether Gore
"invented" the Internet, whether he really grew up on a Tennessee farm [0],
and what earth tone shirts [0] he was (or was not) wearing on the campaign
trail. For Kerry, they wanted to dissect the larger meaning of his hair [0],
mock his recreational activities [0], and debate whether his wife was too
bitchy to be first lady. And now, as Kerry departs the stage, they make up
facts about his Senate speech.
Too often today campaign reporting has become, in a word, gruesome. That's
tied to the point I made in last week's column [0] about the 2008 campaign
running interminably long at 22 months. It's not just the length of the
marathon, or the fact that almost nobody outside the Beltway Bubble is
paying close attention to the grapefruit league machinations taking place on
the field right now. It's that it pains me to contemplate the amount of bad
journalism that's going to be produced during that very long stretch of
time. Clownish coverage of the Kerry speech simply confirms my worst fears
that large portions of the political press corps (with their "eye-rolling
superiority," as the Daily Howler weblog put it [0]) no longer take
politics, or presidential campaigns, seriously.
How else to explain the fact that MSNBC's Carlson not only made up facts
about Kerry crying on the Senate floor but then suggested it would have been
best if, as in the final scene from Of Mice and Men, somebody simply took a
gun and shot Kerry as a mercy killing. "Just blow[] him into the next
world," as Carlson put it.
Sadly, the press' foolery last week was not limited to inaccurately
describing Kerry's emotional state. There was an equally disingenuous
sub-meme that Kerry's speech was insufferably long. The Washington Post's
Dana Milbank complained Kerry "meandered through the better part of half an
hour before getting to the point" about not running in 2008. Milbank's Post
colleague Howard Kurtz also mocked Kerry for being too long-winded: "It was
the quintessential John Kerry. ... Kerry began to talk. And talk." (Both
Milbank and Kurtz deducted style points because Kerry's speech was not
entirely about Kerry himself, which apparently broke some sort of Beltway
Cardinal Rule for politicians.)
Back at MSNBC, Carlson joked the address was "about nine hours long,"
adding, "It was like a Fidel Castro speech."
Fact: Kerry's insightful speech [0], the bulk of which provided a larger
overview of the challenges facing Iraq today, ran a grand total of 36
minutes.
The truth is, what Kerry did during his eloquent and passionate critique of
the war last Wednesday was what our Founding Fathers hoped U.S. senators
would use the chamber for: to speak in depth about the difficult issues
facing the day. What the press was doing, I have no idea. Indeed, the same
Founding Fathers, who brilliantly carved out a unique role for the free
press in our democracy, would have been stunned if they had witnessed
Kerry's address and then read the fictionalized accounts of him allegedly
breaking down in tears on the Senate floor.
Lastly, note the other manufactured theme that popped up in the Kerry
coverage last week -- that Kerry didn't win in 2004 because voters did not
know where he stood regarding Iraq.
"He lost the presidential election largely because of his inability to
articulate what he really thought about the war," wrote Boston Globe
columnist Adrian Walker, making the point several other pundits did. That
has become the media's accepted conventional wisdom. Much of that is driven
by the fact Republicans turned Kerry's 2004 comment, "I actually did vote
for the $87 billion [in war spending] before I voted against it," into a
rhetorical club and to portray Kerry as a flip-flopper. So yes, Republicans,
along with the obedient press corps, insisted -- and continue to insist --
that Kerry's position on the war in 2004 was muddled. But was it?
I recall a certain catchphrase Kerry used during the campaign to describe
Iraq. He called it the wrong war at the wrong place at the wrong time.
(Kerry used that exact phrase in his Wednesday speech in the Senate.) And a
search of the Nexis database yields more than 1,600 news references from the
2004 campaign that mentioned Kerry as well as the three phrases "wrong war,"
"wrong place" and "wrong time." That's because Kerry repeated the mantra at
nearly every possible public appearance during the final months of the
campaign. But now the press tells us Kerry never articulated a clear
position about the war.
Then again, it's the same press corps that last week told us Kerry was
crying on the floor of the Senate.
_______
About author A senior fellow at Media Matters for America, and a former
senior writer for Salon, Boehlert's first book, "Lapdogs: How The Press
Rolled Over for Bush," was published in May. He can be reached at
eboehlert@aol.com [1]
--
NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not
always been authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material
available to advance understanding of
political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. I
believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright
Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107
"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson
By Eric Boehlert
Created Jan 31 2007 - 9:35am
The Barack Obama madrassa hoax [0] isn't the only recent, dishonest campaign
story that deserves close scrutiny. Another, perhaps even more disturbing,
press deception revolved around Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) and the announcement
he made from the floor of the Senate on January 24 that he would not run for
president in 2008. Disturbing, because the fraud did not involve Fox News or
the right-wing InsightMag.com but instead was driven by mainstream media
outlets.
Kerry's speech, which was mocked in the press for being poorly stage managed
(it was too wordy, pundits complained), was also badly mangled by scores of
major news players who concocted the phony storyline that Kerry had shed
tears of regret while announcing his plans to sit out the 2008 race.
Kerry did no such thing, but reporters and pundits went ahead and
manufactured the narrative that the "emotional" and "choked up" senator
became "tearful" as he publicly "let go of his White House dreams." None of
that was accurate. Kerry did become temporarily emotional, but not while he
was discussing his political ambitions.
Granted, the incident was relatively minor, and Kerry himself is no longer
the Democratic Party's standard bearer, which likely explains why the
dishonest coverage of his speech received so little attention. But for
observers who want to understand the media's mindset as the next White House
run unfolds, they'd be hard-pressed to find a more telling and alarming
example than the coverage surrounding Kerry's straightforward proclamation
last week.
Indeed, the incident raises all sorts of doubts, on the eve of the 2008
campaign, about the ability of Beltway journalists to perform the simplest
tasks, such as taking notes when a prominent Democrat gives a speech and
then accurately reporting on that speech.
Not surprisingly, the nasty Kerry narrative was launched last week by Matt
Drudge who posted [0] the wildly inaccurate headline "Kerry Tears on Senate
Floor," which in turn linked to a misleading Financial Times report about
Kerry's speech. The FT article incorrectly reported [0] that Kerry had been
"choking back tears" as he spelled out his campaign plans.
Adopting Drudgespeak, journalists quickly echoed misinformation about
Kerry's presidential announcement:
a.. The Boston Globe painted a very dramatic picture [0], labeling Kerry
"tearful." The paper emphasized that Kerry, "choked back tears on the Senate
floor" as he made his statement.
b.. The dispatch from Connecticut's Hartford Courant was even more vivid
[0], with readers informed that Kerry teetered on an emotional breakdown:
"Choking back tears, he could barely get out the words."
c.. The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz emphasized, "The Massachusetts
senator, his voice breaking, disclosed that he would, in fact, not be a
candidate for president in the next election."
d.. MSNBC's Tucker Carlson mocked [0] Kerry's "teary" campaign speech and
told viewers it was "sad to watch John Kerry cry up there today."
e.. Roger Simon, a columnist for the newly minted Beltway news outlet
Politico, wrote [0] that Kerry "tearfully" bowed out of the 2008 race.
f.. The New York Daily News reported [0] an "emotional" Kerry had been
"choking up a little as he let go of his White House dreams."
g.. A New York Sun editorial [0] reported, "Senator Kerry had to choke
back tears as he announced, on the floor of the Senate, the end of his long
quest for the presidency."
Not one of those descriptions was accurate.
For the record, at no point did Kerry shed any tears on the floor of the
Senate last Wednesday; he simply did not "cry." Rather, during a single
sentence Kerry became emotional and his voice caught. The press' key
distortion though, was that the single sentence had nothing to do with
running for president again. Instead, Kerry was momentarily overcome with
emotion when he noted that the misguided war in Iraq threatened to undo
everything he had fought for since his return from Vietnam more than three
decades ago.
As The Chicago Tribune's political blog, The Swamp, accurately noted [0],
"It was when Kerry talked about coming home from Vietnam that he choked up."
Still, members of the press blissfully manufactured the storyline suggesting
the senator shed tears of self-pity over his dashed presidential hopes.
This is the kind of trickery one would expect from right-wing bloggers,
anxious to manufacture [0] any sort of slight to embarrass a former
Democratic presidential candidate. But why would members of the mainstream
press corps stoop to such depths as fictionalizing the account of Kerry's
speech? Either journalists who reported on and pontificated about the speech
didn't actually witness it (a distinct possibility), or they simply decided
to improve the narrative and bump up the drama by literally inventing the
"fact" that Kerry was "tearful," a false description that appeared in the
very first sentence of the Boston Globe article.
Again, here's the video [0] of Kerry's Senate speech. Watch it. (Fast
forward to the 29-minute mark if you want to see only the final six minutes,
which is where the news was made.) See for yourself that when discussing his
campaign decision Kerry's voice was clear and forceful, not "choked up" or
"emotional." See also that at no point did the senator become "tearful."
Does the press even take campaigns seriously?
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) last week talked about wanting to have a
real dialogue with the American people during her White House campaign. I'm
sure she's not alone among White House aspirants. But you know what, Al Gore
wanted to have a real dialogue in 2000 and so did Kerry in 2004, yet the
campaign press corps was more interested in catcalls [0] about whether Gore
"invented" the Internet, whether he really grew up on a Tennessee farm [0],
and what earth tone shirts [0] he was (or was not) wearing on the campaign
trail. For Kerry, they wanted to dissect the larger meaning of his hair [0],
mock his recreational activities [0], and debate whether his wife was too
bitchy to be first lady. And now, as Kerry departs the stage, they make up
facts about his Senate speech.
Too often today campaign reporting has become, in a word, gruesome. That's
tied to the point I made in last week's column [0] about the 2008 campaign
running interminably long at 22 months. It's not just the length of the
marathon, or the fact that almost nobody outside the Beltway Bubble is
paying close attention to the grapefruit league machinations taking place on
the field right now. It's that it pains me to contemplate the amount of bad
journalism that's going to be produced during that very long stretch of
time. Clownish coverage of the Kerry speech simply confirms my worst fears
that large portions of the political press corps (with their "eye-rolling
superiority," as the Daily Howler weblog put it [0]) no longer take
politics, or presidential campaigns, seriously.
How else to explain the fact that MSNBC's Carlson not only made up facts
about Kerry crying on the Senate floor but then suggested it would have been
best if, as in the final scene from Of Mice and Men, somebody simply took a
gun and shot Kerry as a mercy killing. "Just blow[] him into the next
world," as Carlson put it.
Sadly, the press' foolery last week was not limited to inaccurately
describing Kerry's emotional state. There was an equally disingenuous
sub-meme that Kerry's speech was insufferably long. The Washington Post's
Dana Milbank complained Kerry "meandered through the better part of half an
hour before getting to the point" about not running in 2008. Milbank's Post
colleague Howard Kurtz also mocked Kerry for being too long-winded: "It was
the quintessential John Kerry. ... Kerry began to talk. And talk." (Both
Milbank and Kurtz deducted style points because Kerry's speech was not
entirely about Kerry himself, which apparently broke some sort of Beltway
Cardinal Rule for politicians.)
Back at MSNBC, Carlson joked the address was "about nine hours long,"
adding, "It was like a Fidel Castro speech."
Fact: Kerry's insightful speech [0], the bulk of which provided a larger
overview of the challenges facing Iraq today, ran a grand total of 36
minutes.
The truth is, what Kerry did during his eloquent and passionate critique of
the war last Wednesday was what our Founding Fathers hoped U.S. senators
would use the chamber for: to speak in depth about the difficult issues
facing the day. What the press was doing, I have no idea. Indeed, the same
Founding Fathers, who brilliantly carved out a unique role for the free
press in our democracy, would have been stunned if they had witnessed
Kerry's address and then read the fictionalized accounts of him allegedly
breaking down in tears on the Senate floor.
Lastly, note the other manufactured theme that popped up in the Kerry
coverage last week -- that Kerry didn't win in 2004 because voters did not
know where he stood regarding Iraq.
"He lost the presidential election largely because of his inability to
articulate what he really thought about the war," wrote Boston Globe
columnist Adrian Walker, making the point several other pundits did. That
has become the media's accepted conventional wisdom. Much of that is driven
by the fact Republicans turned Kerry's 2004 comment, "I actually did vote
for the $87 billion [in war spending] before I voted against it," into a
rhetorical club and to portray Kerry as a flip-flopper. So yes, Republicans,
along with the obedient press corps, insisted -- and continue to insist --
that Kerry's position on the war in 2004 was muddled. But was it?
I recall a certain catchphrase Kerry used during the campaign to describe
Iraq. He called it the wrong war at the wrong place at the wrong time.
(Kerry used that exact phrase in his Wednesday speech in the Senate.) And a
search of the Nexis database yields more than 1,600 news references from the
2004 campaign that mentioned Kerry as well as the three phrases "wrong war,"
"wrong place" and "wrong time." That's because Kerry repeated the mantra at
nearly every possible public appearance during the final months of the
campaign. But now the press tells us Kerry never articulated a clear
position about the war.
Then again, it's the same press corps that last week told us Kerry was
crying on the floor of the Senate.
_______
About author A senior fellow at Media Matters for America, and a former
senior writer for Salon, Boehlert's first book, "Lapdogs: How The Press
Rolled Over for Bush," was published in May. He can be reached at
eboehlert@aol.com [1]
--
NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not
always been authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material
available to advance understanding of
political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. I
believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright
Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107
"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson