Tuesday, February 10, 2004

Regular readers of Roger Ailes undoubtedly are sick of my tirades against Howard Kurtz and his whorish "media column." But before I give it a rest, I feel compelled to point out that today's Media Notes Extra is particularly grotesque.

Howie's column isn't really about the media at all, but rather a selective rehash of a ten-month-old Boston Globe series on John Kerry. He starts out inauspiciously:

The Boston Globe revisited the era in its seven-part series on the Massachusetts senator last year, and I've slogged through it again so you don't have to. The series also casts a slightly different light on Kerry's Vietnam heroics.

And you can't slog through it, Howie fails to provide a link.

While Howie claims the series "casts a different light on Kerry's Vietnam heroics," he mainly avoids the part of the series which actually addresses Kerry's time in Vietnam and, with one exception, quotes entirely from Part 3, which addresses Kerry's activities in the United States after serving after Vietnam. Howie cites cheap shots from Tricky Dick and his criminal crew: Charles Colson, H.R. Halderman and Spiro Agnew.

Most offensively, Kurtz claims that "Kerry had testified that some U.S. soldiers had raped, mutilated and randomly shot at civilians, shot cattle and dogs for fun and otherwise behaved abominably." This lie -- which has been repeated by lowlifes like Mark "Shite" Steyn and Sean Hannity -- has been exposed by bloggers Scoobie Davis, who quotes what Kerry actually said. On this point, it must be said that the Boston Globe article is no better, misquoting Kerry as well. But Kurtz doesn't mind repeating a smear if he can attribute it to someone else, including convicted criminals like Colson and admitted felons like Agnew.

No comments: