Dems and MediaTried to Steal Another Election

JFK stole the election from Nixon as Texas and Illionois had precincts casting
more votes than live residents. Nixon gave graciously what he could not find
in his heart to deny.

They tried to steal this one , too. You won't read about this in the NY Times.
Astute pajamahadin also noted that the official Pa count for Bush actually
went down by over 100,000 votes in the wee hours of the night.
Thanks to NRO - battleground states.

bmp

PS - Has Dan Rather conceded Ohio yet?

_____________________________

MICHIGAN: THE MOOD [Henry Payne 11/04 06:40 AM]

Republicans in Michigan are breathing a sigh of relief today - and not only
because President Bush won a second term, despite narrowly losing Michigan.

In Detroit, mostly white Republican poll watchers dispatched to monitor
mostly-black city vote counting encountered uncomfortable, racially charged
situations. Poll watchers overseeing absentee vote-counting at Cobo Center, for
example, reported widespread fraud in the counting of ballots. The incident
raised the specter of a politically dicey GOP lawsuit, a move now less urgent
given Bush's national victory.

"Craziest thing I've ever seen," said one poll watcher. "They had 100 tables
and just five poll watchers trying to monitor them. Every table had a pile of
empty ballots. If the machine rejected a ballot, the workers would just take a
fresh ballot, fill it in the way they thought the voter wanted (Detroit voted
heavily for Kerry), and then put THAT ballot through the machine." The poll
watcher also reported unsigned ballots being counted in the machines, a
violation of absentee procedures.

Alarmed by this open fraud, the party brought in more poll watchers only to be
confronted, according to a Detroit Free Press account, by a Kerry campaign
lawyer "who arrived and began yelling at the 20-30 GOP lawyers." Policemen were
called to restore order to the proceedings after which the additional
Republican poll watchers were all escorted off the premises.

The Cobo vote fraud was the most serious incident in an evening that included a
judge ruling for Republicans when poll watchers were cast out of other polling
places. Democratic voters, in turn, complained that "they felt intimidated by a
stranger watching them and wanting to check identification" according the Free
Press account. All in all, an unsettling evening here in Southeast Michigan.

The Media has gone beyond Laughable and into the realm of contemptuous and
criminal.

Who is Screwing with My Information and Why are they Not in Jail?

BMP

---------------------------------------------

The Ten Worst Media Distortions
of Campaign 2004




--------------------------------------------------------------------------
------

by Brent H. Baker, Rich Noyes and Tim Graham
PDF Version


In a fit of candor back in July, Evan Thomas, Newsweek’s Assistant
Managing Editor, blurted out the truth: most reporters want President George W.
Bush to lose and John Kerry to win. Appearing on the syndicated program Inside
Washington July 10, Thomas zeroed in on the adoring coverage most in the media,
including his own magazine, were awarding John Kerry and John Edwards.

“The media, I think, wants Kerry to win,” Thomas explained. “And I
think they’re going to portray Kerry and Edwards — I’m talking about the
establishment media, not Fox — but they’re going to portray Kerry and
Edwards as being young and dynamic and optimistic and all. There’s going to
be this glow about them that some, is going to be worth, collectively, the two
of them, that’s going to be worth maybe 15 points.”

Appearing on CNN’s Reliable Sources three months later, Thomas told the
Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz that he was wrong to peg the value of the
media’s contribution at “maybe 15 points” for the Democrats, but said he
“absolutely” believed the media preferred Kerry and Edwards. He speculated
that media bias might be worth five points for the Democrats on Election Day.

Thomas’s observation fits with a poll taken by the Pew Research Center
for The People & The Press back in May. The group surveyed 247 journalists at
national-level outlets, and found only a piddling seven percent would describe
themselves as “conservative,” compared to 33 percent of the overall
population. While the majority of journalists (54 percent) labeled themselves
as “moderate,” one out of three national journalists (34 percent) called
themselves “liberal,” a far higher rate than the regular public (23
percent).
Ten Worst

1. Dan Rather’s Forgery Fiasco
2. Ignoring, then Attacking, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth
3. Pounding the Bush National Guard Story
4. Spinning a Good Economy into Bad News
5. The Networks’ Outrageous Convention Double-Standard
6. Swooning Over Edwards’ Image, Ignoring His Liberalism
7. CBS’s Byron Pitts Promotional Kerry Coverage
8. CBS Promotes Fears of a New Military Draft
9. Misrepresenting the 9/11 Commission on Iraq/al-Qaeda Links
10. Equating New Terrorism Warning to LBJ’s “Gulf of Tonkin”


Pew found that journalists’ ideology seems to affect how they approach
their profession. In May, a mere eight percent of the national press believed
the media were being “too critical” of President Bush, compared to nearly
seven times as many (55 percent) who thought the media were “not critical
enough.”

Journalists’ desire for more bad news about Bush contrasts with their
feelings about the media’s treatment of Bill Clinton. Back in 1995, as
recounted in the MRC’s June 1995 edition of MediaWatch, 48 percent of
national journalists thought there was “too little” news about Clinton’s
achievements in office, compared to just two percent who thought the press had
given “too much” coverage to his achievements.

No matter who wins or loses this year’s presidential election, Campaign
2004 will be remembered for the unprecedented partisanship of the so-called
mainstream media, as the Media Research Center has documented all year. Here
are our awards for the ten most-biased episodes in Campaign 2004, along with
commendations for those instances when journalists rose above their bias and
approached their craft in a fair and balanced way.



Dan Rather’s Forgery Fiasco

On September 8, Dan Rather led off his CBS Evening News by touting four
exclusively-obtained “memos” purportedly showing that George W. Bush’s
squadron commander, Jerry Killian, was fed up with the young Air National Guard
Lieutenant’s failure to get a physical exam. The same documents also starred
on 60 Minutes that night, as did a major Democratic partisan, Ben Barnes, who
claimed he was “sorry” he helped Bush get a slot in the National Guard, a
suspicious reversal of his previous accounts.

CBS’s new “evidence” triggered stories in every major news outlet,
including the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, USA Today,
ABC, NBC, FNC and CNN. But by Friday, September 10, many of those same news
organizations quoted independent experts doubting the authenticity of the
memos, dated 1972 and 1973, since they looked computer-generated, not typed,
citing a range of formatting issues. Then Killian’s widow told ABC Radio that
her late husband did not type or keep extensive records, and Killian’s son
told the Associated Press he doubted his father wrote those “memos.”

But on the September 10 Evening News, Rather offered a six-minute response
that repeated his indictment of Bush, ignored most of the substantive charges
(including any mention of Killian’s family) and cast CBS’s critics as
partisan and unreliable: “Today, on the Internet and elsewhere, some people,
including many who are partisan political operatives, concentrated not on the
key questions of the overall story, but on the documents that were part of the
support of the story.” So it didn’t matter that his “memos” were a
fraud?
Dan Rather used the forgery flap as an excuse to repeat his indictment of
Bush's Guard service.

Rather and his network spent the next week pointing fingers at others,
falsely suggesting that CBS was promoting “truth” in the face of
“partisan political ideological forces.” Rather told the New York
Observer’s Joe Hagan: “Powerful and extremely well-financed forces are
concentrating on questions about the documents because they can’t deny the
fundamental truth of the story.” He added, “This is your basic fogging
machine, which is set up to cloud the issue, to obscure the truth.”

In an interview with the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz, Rather boasted
about standing up to right-wing meanies: “I don’t back down. I don’t cave
when the pressure gets too great from these partisan political ideological
forces.”

Even as he continued to impugn Bush’s National Guard service, the CBS
anchor portrayed himself as the victim: “People who are so passionately
partisan politically or ideologically committed basically say, ‘Because he
won’t report it our way, we’re going to hang something bad around his neck
and choke him with it, check him out of existence if we can, if not make him
feel great pain.’ They know that I’m fiercely independent and that’s what
drives them up a wall,” Rather told USA Today’s Peter Johnson and Jim
Drinkard.

Josh Howard, the Executive Producer of the Wednesday edition of 60
Minutes, even tried to blame Bush himself, telling the Los Angeles Times: “If
we had gotten back from the White House any kind of red flag, raised eyebrow,
anything... we would have gone back to square one.” But, Howard told the
Times, “the White House said they were authentic, and that carried a lot of
weight with us.”

That’s incorrect. The White House, which only saw the “memos” a few
hours before 60 Minutes went on the air, did not confirm the authenticity of
CBS’s fraud memos. That job was botched by CBS itself.

On September 20, twelve days after their original report aired, Rather
revealed that CBS got the “memos” from a disgruntled ex-National Guardsman,
Bill Burkett, who had a long grudge against Bush. But Rather only admitted that
CBS could not authenticate the documents, telling the Chicago Tribune, “Do I
think they’re forged? No.”

Some in the liberal media refused to condemn CBS for sacrificing its
professional ethics in pursuit of a political agenda. CNN anchor Aaron Brown
was the most condescending, sniffing that those who linked the memo scandal
with liberal bias lack brainpower. “Some partisans...will see willful
deception on the part of CBS,” Brown lectured on the September 20 NewsNight.
“Smarter and more reasoned heads know better.”
CNN's Aaron Brown said "smarter" people know Dan Rather wasn't engaged in
"willful deception"

On the Bright Side: ABC Investigated CBS’s Document Experts

Even as CBS News was claiming that its independent document experts had
vouched for the four forged memos at the center of their anti-Bush story,
ABC’s World News Tonight revealed that two of the experts CBS consulted
thought the documents were suspicious. On September 14, ABC’s Brian Ross
reported that “two experts hired by CBS News say the network ignored concerns
they raised prior to the broadcast about the disputed National Guard
records.”

Ross explained how Emily Will, a certified document examiner, “says she
saw problems right away with the one document CBS hired her to check in the
days before the broadcast.” Will recalled how right before the Wednesday,
September 8, broadcast she predicted: “I told them that all the questions I
was asking them at that time, which was Tuesday night, they were going to be
asked by hundreds of other document examiners on Thursday if they ran that
story.” Then Ross noted how “a second document examiner hired by CBS News,
Linda James of Plano, Texas, told ABC News she too had concerns about the
documents prior to the broadcast.”

But to viewers, Ross pointed out, “CBS made no mention that any expert
disputed the authenticity of the documents.”



Ignoring, then Attacking,
the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth

Even before John Kerry used his Vietnam record to vault to victory in the
Iowa Democratic caucuses, the national media frequently touted the
Massachusetts liberal as a decorated, thrice-wounded war hero. But apart from
interviewing the small group of Vietnam veterans who have campaigned with Kerry
over the last two decades, national reporters did not seek out others to
confirm or challenge the tales of Kerry’s valor and heroism. The networks'
approach to questions about Kerry’s past is in stark contrast to the
aggressiveness with which they pursued theories about Bush’s National Guard
service (see #3).

Then on May 4, a group of more than 250 Vietnam veterans — including
Kerry’s superior officers and many who served with him when he was a Swift
Boat commander — launched a public challenge to Kerry’s version of Vietnam.
At a press conference, they charged Kerry had greatly embellished his military
record and betrayed his fellow Swift Boat veterans when he went before the
Senate to make sweeping charges of American war crimes in Vietnam. Based on
this record, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth declared Kerry “unfit” to serve
as Commander in Chief.

Yet the national media still offered little scrutiny of either Kerry’s
service or his anti-war rhetoric. The ABC and NBC evening newscasts ignored the
Swift Boat veterans’ press conference, while on the May 4 CBS Evening News
Byron Pitts chose to impugn their integrity: “If you think this is just a
group of concerned veterans, think again.”
Instead of scrutinizing John Kerry, CBS's Byron Pitts smeared Kerry's critics.

On May 31, nearly four weeks after these veterans came forward, CNN
NewsNight anchor Aaron Brown narrated a four-minute long Memorial Day account
of John Kerry’s exploits in Vietnam that only quoted Kerry and the handful of
veterans who had signed up for his presidential campaign. Brown’s
panegyrical, event-by-event tribute to Kerry’s heroism — which could have
passed as a Democratic National Committee infomercial — did not include a
single syllable about the questions raised by the other Swift Boat veterans.

NBC Nightly News ignored the Swift Boat veterans for three months, until
August 6. Then, after the veterans raised $150,000 for a TV ad — a tiny sum
compared to what George Soros and MoveOn.org had by then spent on anti-Bush ads
— NBC aired a story suggesting that the ad was the scurrilous work of
anti-Kerry forces exploiting a loophole.
“The ad is paid for by Bush contributors using a loophole in the
McCain-Feingold law,” reporter Andrea Mitchell complained on the NBC Nightly
News, adding “some of the same players organized anonymous attack ads against
John McCain four years ago.”

NBC News portrayed the ad as the scurrilous work of anti-Kerry "hit men"
exploiting a loophole.

Earlier that day, on the August 6 Imus in the Morning on MSNBC, Mitchell
told radio host Don Imus that the anti-Kerry vets were “grossly distorting
the record, according to anybody who knows anything about Kerry’s record.”
If that was true, then why didn’t Mitchell tell Nightly News viewers about
Kerry’s real record, instead of merely grumbling about who paid for the TV
spot?

ABC’s World News Tonight did not mention the existence of the anti-Kerry
Swift vets until Kerry himself gave a speech attacking the credibility and
integrity of his fellow veterans. Kerry’s speech on August 19 marked the
point when the liberal media began to actively cover the story, but even then
most of their scrutiny was reserved for the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, not
the candidate seeking the highest office in the land.

Peter Jennings, for one, was unhappy with even the puny amount of
attention his network gave to the Swift Boat veterans’ charges. “The ads
were demonstrably false,” he asserted at a New Yorker forum on October 2,
suggesting that he and his colleagues should have been faster to exonerate
Kerry: “If you look seriously at the coverage, I think you didn’t find the
media quick enough to say these were demonstrably false, for the most part. And
we did what we do tend to do in journalism sometimes, he said, she said, he
said, she said.”

On the Bright Side: FNC Reported Kerry’s Cambodia Capitulation

On August 11, the Kerry campaign backtracked from John Kerry’s
oft-repeated claim that he was in Cambodia on Christmas Eve 1968, in what would
have been a violation of international law by the U.S., but only the Fox News
Channel cared and ran a full story on the admission prompted by John
O’Neill’s book, Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against
John Kerry.

On FNC’s Special Report, anchor Brit Hume announced: “A new book about
John Kerry has prompted a debate unlike any seen in modern presidential
history: whether a decorated war veteran really is a hero. The Kerry campaign
has dismissed the book as a political smear, but now the Kerry camp is making
adjustments in key parts of a story Kerry has told about fighting in
Cambodia.”

Reporter Major Garrett elaborated: “The Kerry campaign has been forced
to admit errors in statements Kerry made in a 1979 Boston Herald article and in
a 1986 Senate speech shown here in the Congressional Record about vivid
memories of his leading a Swift Boat deep into Cambodia and taking enemy fire
on Christmas Eve 1968.”

Garrett then showed a soundbite from Kerry’s designated surrogate,
“Veterans for Kerry” spokesman John Hurley: “I don’t know that anyone
can actually say whether or not they were in Cambodia.”

Garrett qualified Kerry’s new story: “The Kerry campaign also says
Kerry was in Cambodia on a different mission with Navy Seals but can provide no
date for that mission....In the past, Kerry has written that the Cambodian
incursion on Christmas Eve was, quote, ‘seared into his memory.’” He then
showed another clip from his interview with the pro-Kerry Hurley: “I think
the experience is seared into his memory. I think that he knows that he was
under fire in Cambodia. I think the date is what’s inaccurate, that it was
just not Christmas Eve day.”



Pounding the Bush National Guard Story


The networks did their best to ignore or demean the Vietnam veterans who
criticized John Kerry’s military service and post-Vietnam activities as an
anti-war activist (see #2), but when Democratic partisans like Terry McAuliffe
and Michael Moore in February challenged President Bush's service in the Texas
Air National Guard, reporters quickly adopted the issue as their own and
criticized as unsatisfactory every answer provided by the White House.

Reporters could not justify pursuing the Bush “AWOL” story by citing
any actual proof of wrongdoing, any relevance to Bush’s role as President,
any sign that his conduct in 1972-73 was especially uncommon, or any clamoring
from voters to get to the bottom of the story. The only impetus was DNC boss
Terry McAuliffe’s stated desire to contrast “John Kerry, a war hero with a
chest full of medals” with “George Bush, a man who was AWOL in the Alabama
National Guard.”

The networks followed McAuliffe’s agenda. From February 1 through
February 16, ABC, CBS and NBC aired 63 National Guard stories or interview
segments on their morning and evening news programs. That’s far more coverage
than Bill Clinton’s draft-dodging scandal received in 1992. Back then, the
three evening newscasts offered 10 stories on Clinton’s complete evasion of
service; this year, those same broadcasts pumped out 25 stories on whether
Bush’s acknowledged service was fully documented.

Despite the fact that no Democrat had substantiated their AWOL claims, the
networks put the burden on Bush to prove his innocence. After the White House
released documents on February 10 showing Bush had satisfied the Guard’s
requirements and received an honorable discharge, reporters wanted more
evidence (see box). The records showed Bush was never “AWOL,” exposing the
baselessness of the Democrats’ original charge, yet none of the networks
framed their stories around questionable Democratic tactics. Instead, they kept
the onus on Bush: “The issue is not going to go away,” ABC’s Terry Moran
promised. Other lowlights:

¦ On February 12, the CBS Evening News promoted a conspiracy theory floated by
disgruntled ex-National Guard officer Bill Burkett, who claimed he overheard a
1997 order to purge Bush’s records. The Boston Globe reported the next day
that Burkett’s back-up, George Conn, totally disagreed with his friend’s
version of what happened, but the Evening News never told viewers about that
crucial detail. (Six months later, CBS would again rely on Burkett as a crucial
source for an anti-Bush National Guard story, as Burkett later revealed himself
as the provider of forged documents to CBS’s 60 Minutes. See #1.)

¦ Early on, John Kerry tried to egg on the media. “Was he present and
active, on duty in Alabama, at the times he was supposed to be?” he
challenged on February 8. “Just because you get an honorable discharge does
not, in fact, answer that question.” Given Kerry’s defense of the
draft-dodging Clinton twelve years ago (“We do not need now to divide America
over who served and how”), unbiased reporters would have questioned the
candidate for his hypocrisy in at least not repudiating the other Democratic
“dividers,” but ABC, CBS and NBC concealed the Kerry flip-flop and kept him
above the fray.

¦ On February 12, Peter Jennings did not report the finding of ABC’s polling
unit that two-thirds of the public, including 58 percent of Democrats, thought
the Bush National Guard story was “not a legitimate issue.” Instead,
Jennings highlighted how Bush’s “rating for honesty and trustworthiness is
at a new low” — as if the networks’ biased promotion of unproved partisan
charges had nothing to do with that.

Time magazine writer Joe Klein, a regular on CNN this political season,
branded the “AWOL” story as “gutter politics,” but he was nevertheless
pleased to see President Bush on the receiving end of unfair attacks.

“Gutter politics goes both ways. And I think that in this case, what
we’re talking about is a legitimate issue of character which is peripheral to
the campaign, not nearly as important as issues of war and solvency, but it’s
an issue,” he justified on CNN’s Paula Zahn Now on February 11. “It’s
kind of fun to watch Republicans respond to the kind of politics that they’ve
been practicing for the last 20 years, especially the Bush family in 1988 and
in 2000.”



Spinning a Good Economy into Bad News


When Bill Clinton ran for re-election in 1996, unemployment was 5.2
percent, inflation 3 percent, and economic growth 2.2 percent. Economic
conditions are similar, if not better, today: unemployment is 5.4 percent,
inflation 2.7 percent, and economists’ consensus forecast for economic growth
this quarter is 3.7 percent. But the networks have stressed the downside of the
most positive economic reports, and given wide play to any statistics
suggesting weakness.

On April 2, after the Labor Department announced how 300,000 jobs were
created in March, NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams was dubious:
“Today’s announcement was such a badly needed shot in the arm for the Bush
administration — and was such good news — some thought the numbers were too
good to be true.”

The networks quickly got back to pessimism: On ABC’s World News Tonight
the next evening, anchor Dan Harris introduced a story on how “some of those
who are actually finding jobs are not getting the ones they had in mind.”
Reporter Heather Cabot looked at an accountant who is now driving a cab in New
York City. Cabot asserted, “He’s not the only over-qualified cabbie on the
road. Today, nearly 16 percent of America’s taxi drivers have attended
college.”

In May, the networks pounded the bad news of “record-high” gas prices,
even though the inflation adjusted price of gasoline never approached the
record highs of the early 1980s. Reporters fell over themselves trying to push
the same negative line, from Peter Jennings (“certainly a record”) to Dan
Rather (“record highs”), Tom Brokaw (“record-high gas prices”) to CNN
anchor Aaron Brown (“rising to records”), CNN’s John King (“certainly a
record”), NBC’s Carl Quintanilla (“record-high gas prices”), CBS’s
Julie Chen (“record gas prices”), and finally ABC’s Jake Tapper
(“record-high prices”), who found a man on the street to lament, “It’s
going to kill us. These prices are going to kill us, man.”

At the time, real gas prices stood 26 percent lower than their peak in
March 1981, when the average price per gallon translated to $2.99 in today’s
dollars.

CBS specialized in cherry-picking bad news. On Friday, June 4, we learned
the booming U.S. economy created 947,000 new jobs in March, April and May, but
CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather spent just 20 seconds on that good news.
Reporter Jim Axelrod then devoted two minutes to an Ohio company that was
laying off employees. “After 103 years,” Axelrod intoned, “work at this
plant in Canton, Ohio is set to stop. The Timken Company is shutting three
factories and shedding 1300 jobs....The 1300 jobs lost here, at a company whose
chairman is one of his strongest supporters, that’s bad for the President,
very bad.”

On June 30, CBS business reporter Anthony Mason hyped how a slight
increase by the Federal Reserve to a 1.25 percent interest rate meant “the
era of cheap money is over.” Instead of saying that the Federal Reserve’s
rate change ratified the recovery’s growing strength, Mason on the CBS
Evening News stressed bank layoffs and the harm to everyday consumers: “Your
credit card interest rate will be rising. So will adjustable rate mortgages.
And say goodbye to those zero percent auto loans.”

On October 8, after the 13th straight month of reported job gains, CBS
anchor Dan Rather chose to link President Bush with the worst economic period
in American history. Apparently assuming poor job growth over the next four
months, Rather proclaimed, “It’s the first net job loss on a President’s
watch since Herbert Hoover during the Great Depression of the 1930s.” But in
none of CBS’s employment reports this year did the network quantify for
viewers the number of jobs lost as a direct consequence of the September 11,
2001 terrorist attacks.



The Networks’ Outrageous
Convention Double-Standard

The media’s bias was never clearer than when it came to the two party
conventions. In Boston, network journalists touted Democratic speakers as
“rock stars,” but at the Republican convention in New York those same
reporters led the resistance.

Less than 24 hours before the GOP convention convened, Tom Brokaw on the
August 29 NBC Nightly News warned viewers not to believe that Republicans were
sensible centrists just because moderates like John McCain were on the stage:
“Streetwise New Yorkers may call that the political equivalent of a popular
con game in this tough town — three-card monte. But then,” he rued,
“that’s a game in which the dealer almost always wins.”

The next night, Dan Rather began the CBS Evening News: “Tonight, inside
a post-9/11 security fortress, the Republican Convention opens in New York to
re-nominate George W. Bush and showcase the party’s, quote, ‘moderate
side.’ Will voters buy it?” On the August 31 Inside Politics, CNN’s Judy
Woodruff worried out loud: “Can the Republicans get away with putting these
moderate speakers up there and saying, ‘Hey, we’re really more moderate
than what a lot of people say we are’?”

CNN hated the convention speakers, too. On the September 1 NewsNight,
political analyst Bill Schneider complained, “This is a very angry
convention, it’s a very belligerent convention. I mean, I’ve covered 16
conventions.” He zeroed in on Zell Miller’s keynote address: “I’ve
never heard such an angry speech.” A few minutes later, Time magazine writer
Joe Klein, a CNN regular, also castigated Miller, a Democratic Senator who
crossed party lines to endorse Bush: “I’ve been doing this for a fair
number of years and I don’t think I’ve seen anything as angry or as ugly as
Miller’s speech.”
Time's Joe Klein disparaged Zell Miller's speech as "angry" and "ugly"

But five weeks earlier, CNN and the rest of the liberal media were
enthusiastic about the Democratic convention. ABC’s Charles Gibson began the
July 27 Good Morning America by celebrating the Democrats’ energy: “I’ve
been coming to conventions now since 1968, and I know they’re controlled and
they’re scripted, but you can tell a lot about how energized a party is. And
Monday night, for a convention, was rocking here. People were juiced like I
don’t think I’ve seen at a convention ever before. This place really was
moving last night.”

Over on CBS, morning co-anchor Hannah Storm was even more ecstatic: “In
this sports-mad town, it was like the Celtics were playing in a championship
game here at the Fleet Center last night. It was absolutely electric. Good
morning to all of you. It was just rocking here last night,” she began the
July 27 Early Show.

NBC’s Brokaw, who would later complain about GOP “con games,”
swooned over Bill Clinton’s opening night speech July 26. “The Democratic
Party is off to its start here in Boston by bringing out their biggest rock
star. They call him Elvis, and not for nothing,” Brokaw raved. Following
Tuesday night’s keynote address by liberal Senate candidate Barack Obama,
MSNBC’s Chris Matthews gushed that he’d “just seen the first black
President.”

Most of the applause was saved for the candidates, however. Following John
Edwards’ speech on Wednesday, July 28, CBS’s John Roberts admired how
“just the personality that Edwards exudes when he comes to these events is
something that’s pretty infectious with these delegates. And I talked to one
delegate yesterday who says ‘you know, I’m coming to like John Kerry but I
haven’t yet fallen in love with him, but I will tell you this: I have fallen
in love with John Edwards.’ It’s obvious the charisma out there gets to
everybody here in the Fleet Center.”

During live coverage on July 29, ABC reporter Dan Harris gushed how he
watched John Kerry deliver his acceptance speech while “standing next to the
young speech writer who worked with Kerry on this speech....The look on his
face: Rhapsody throughout.” On CBS, Dan Rather championed how there was “an
almost literal thunder inside the hall, shaking the Fleet Center in a way that
it seldom shakes, if ever, even during a Celtics basketball playoff game.”
Bob Schieffer echoed Rather: “This is the best speech I have ever heard John
Kerry make. I listened to a lot of speeches back there in the primary. This was
the best. This was a very deft critique of policy.”



Swooning Over Edwards’ Image,
Ignoring His Liberalism

When George W. Bush selected Dick Cheney as his running mate in 2000, the
networks went into overdrive warning audiences that the man who turned out to
be their next Vice President was a “hard right” conservative. But after
John Kerry selected John Edwards as his running mate on July 6, those same
networks skipped over Edwards’ strict liberal voting record, instead touting
the supposedly wonderful image and personality of the ex-trial lawyer.

“John Edwards’ phone rang this morning at 7:30,” NBC’s Carl
Quintanilla trumpeted on the July 6 NBC Nightly News, “and on the other end,
John Kerry both formalized Edwards’ rock star status and answered
Democrats’ demands too loud to ignore.”

Byron Pitts, on the same night’s CBS Evening News, fawned how “with a
style as syrupy as Carolina sweet tea, Edwards could also help in the South.”
Pitts insisted: “Democrats have what many consider their dream team.”

And over on ABC’s World News Tonight, Dan Harris offered hope: “With
his Southern accent and son of a mill worker biography, he may very well appeal
to rural voters who the Democrats badly need.” George Stephanopoulos opined,
“He may have only two campaigns under his belt, but Democrats say Edwards
makes up for his slim political resume with raw political talent. A na