More evidence: Ex-Swiftie couldn't get the media to listen to him.

[ginnyinWI]

Ed Schultz had Steve Hayes on today. He's a former Lt. and Swift Boat skipper who started out with the SBVT but then quit when he saw their dishonesty. He ended up voting for Kerry even though he's a strong Republican.

He told Ed on the show today that the media wouldn't listen to his side of the story. Apparently, they didn't want to spoil a nice, juicy story by having some guy come out and debunk the lies!

The audio clip is now up here: http://www.wegoted.com/dailyAudio/index.asp

[blm]

1. So when he's WITH the swifts media gave him airtime and when he came clean

and tried to tell the truth about what they were doing, the media shut him out.

And some people still think there was no intentional media complicity.

[AtomicKitten]

3. are you kidding?

OF COURSE the Media Heathers are complicit.

One would have to be dead or functionally retarded to think otherwise.

[ginnyinWI]

4. well, the point here is:

People keep blaming Kerry for not fighting back at the time. But this gives us more evidence that the media didn't even want to hear it--they wanted to keep the story going instead. Some may say they wanted * to win--I think it's more about money and ratings. They instinctively go for the dirt rather than the truth, if the dirt happens to be more interesting.

[AtomicKitten]

6. the media has ceased to be about news and the truth

and instead is about entertainment, and dishing dirt apparently attracts an audience. Disgraceful.

[blm]

7. ginny, you attribute more ethics to the media than I do. If it was all

about ratings they would have been all over Bush's TANG story long ago. Not to mention his huge financial scandals that make Clinton's Whitewater look like a misplaced piggy bank.

[ginnyinWI]

10. true enough.

It's also about keeping the party of big money in power. Which makes Dems fair game and Republicans get a pass.

[MH1]

12. Not just the party of money

The party more likely to allow continued media consolidation - i.e. bigger and bigger profits for the media mega-corporations and less and less competition.

[blm]

15. The networks make their bigger profits from the primary business interest

DEFENSE INDUSTRY - construction - advertising - whatever. Telling the truth would lose them their tax breaks and cost them in fairer wages for their labor pool. Those damn Democrats always looking out for the working class and their needs when the rich have a fifth house they want to buy in Cancun.

[ProSense]

8. Thanks! More evidence on top of the

more than 400 ads the MSM ran disguised as news:

By the time the Swift Boat story had played out, CNN, chasing after ratings leader Fox News, found time to mention the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth–hereafter, Swifties–in nearly 300 separate news segments, while more than one hundred New York Times articles and columns made mention of the Swifties. And during one overheated 12-day span in late August, the Washington Post mentioned the Swifties in page-one stories on Aug. 19, 20, 21 (two separate articles), 22, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, and 31. It was a media monsoon that washed away Kerry’s momentum coming out of the Democratic convention.

http://blog.thedemocraticdaily.com/?p=2880

[karynnj]

9. This really shows the great job Kerry did in the debates

and to a lesser degree at his convention. Those were about the only 2 times people saw him not filtered by the media. At the convention, he only had 3 hours - and Clinton got 1 and Edwards got 1, leaving Kerry only 1 hour.

Kerry was down by a substantial amount before the debates and he pretty much made it up.

[ginnyinWI]

11. he did come back up, and the GOP seemed worried,

and then the Osama tape came out and he dipped down again. Taking the campaign as a whole, it's hard to say whether the Swifties did permanent damage--although it's been accepted as fact by all of the pundits.

Neither party got much of a bump from their conventions; it's as if most people had their minds pretty much made up well beforehand. People who wanted to believe the lies did, and people who wanted to believe Kerry, did that. I know--there are those undecideds, who I can not understand for the life of me. I suppose those are the ones who tipped it one way or the other. It was so close: if we could have prevented all of the fraud I'm sure Kerry would be president now.

[Tactical Progressive]

19. No, it's not about money and ratings

That media excusology is almost a decade old now. It's what they were peddling during Monicagate. Trouble is, people were turning off news coverage in droves when the media was working with Republicans to savage Bill Clinton. Ratings were DOWN and they couldn't hide that.

I saw the media questioned exactly once for their untrue ratings excuse for going after Clinton and their (huffy) response was: 'Well, this is a "Constitutional crisis" and we have an "obligation as journalists" to cover it, even if the ratings are way down.' Oh yeah, sex sells, except when it doesn't, then we need to find another rationalization because it was never 'sex sells' to begin with; it was we want to smear Bill Clinton and ratings is our excuse, until it isn't and we need another.

When cable news became mainstream in the late '90's, that same excuse, already debunked above by the ratings downfall, got a second wind and morphed into the broader "need to feed the voracious 24/7 cable news cycle" by throwing dirt on Clinton and Gore.

Unfortunately the broader, more implicit version of the same ratings excuse was definitively proven for the lie that it was, yet again, with the media's absolute refusal to cover anything remotely scandalous about Bush. From the start, titillation over Bush corruption, past or present, was not needed to "feed the voracious 24/7 cable news cycle". Quite the opposite. When Dan Rather put the proof to what everybody already knew about Bush dodging his National Guard service, the rest of the media turned on one of the most revered of their own for even trying. Not credible enough apparently. Not as credible as the SmearBoaters, apparently.

The media goes round-robin with their tawdry excuses, and they sound plausible until you step back and see the blatant dishonesty of HOW they apply their rationalizations. Only then do you see the complete hypocrisy of American journalism.

Ratings are why they attack Democrats even when they aren't, and they won't attack Republicans even if ratings would go up. They need to feed cable news with Dem scandals even if they're contrived; there's no need to air deep Republican corruption to 'feed' anything. It's a Constitutional crisis when a Dem philanders, it's nothing when our Constitution is being mauled by Republicans. And on and on and on and on and on.

You are right about Kerry not being to blame. He did fight back, as did others for him. The problem is that American journalism is corrupt to the core, and effectively as ugly as the right-wing ideology it promotes and serves. Don't take a single one of their excuses at face value.

[blm]

20. You just nailed it all down perfectly -

Your analysis deserves its own thread - if you put it up you'll definitely get a recommend from me. Your said it a hundred times better than I ever could.

[fedupinBushcountry]

21. Perfectly put

I agree with BLM, this deserves a thread of its own and I too would recommend it.

[blm]

22. here's hoping that excellent post gets its own thread....

.

[emcguffie]

23. You are making my point.

The media wouldn't LET Kerry fight back.

The media, the blessed media, think they run the country. And they do. And now the FCC is going to relax more rules, so they can run it better. they just want to help Bush be that dictator he said he wanted to be.

[MH1]

2. Thanks for the link - I'm off to listen now! nt

[Cha]

5. I'd like to paraphrase

Mike Malloy and say.."Have I mentioned how much I hate the corporatemediawhore$$$ in the USA?"

[glitch]

14. a$$holes = people who sell their souls for filthy lucre. also airholes

corporate whores on the teevee.

[wisteria]

13. What a damn shame, the media suppressed the truth. It is a real

disgrace this was allowed to go on during an election. This just makes the media look worse. The media should be held accountable for the destruction Bush has wrought, they had much to do with his reelection.

[blm]

17. Media kept the veneer polished for Bush so people would swallow that

he won and not question his absurdly high vote totals.

[Catchawave]

16. Not even the lefty-media....?

Raw Story, Truthout....etc ?

I still wish JK would have pushed a stop (cease and desist?) order against these swiftcreeps back in '04. It was defamation of a war veteran! In the meantime, Team Chickenhawk (Bush-Cheney) had no'splainin' to do :shrug:

[blm]

18. There is no left media accessed by the general public.

.