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Faulking Around - Sep 25, 2004 - Printable Version
- "Media Bias?" or "All the News That's Fit to Print"
by Mark Faulk
Remember all the debate about Kerry's Vietnam War record, and whether or not he deserved the medals he earned (while Bush was drinking beer and missing drug tests in the National Guard)? How can we forget, it saturated every radio talk show, dominated Fox News, and was covered by every right wing publication for weeks. The coverage was relentless, the accusations endless. Then, suddenly, a couple of days ago, the media mysteriously dropped the issue. Was it just because it ran it's course, or did they get all the mileage out of it that they could get, and move on to the next anti-Kerry tirade?
As it turns out, there is a reason why the room suddenly got uncomfortably quiet. A far-right activist group that bills itself as a "public interest law firm dedicated to fighting government corruption" (yeah right, and the KKK is "an affiliate of the Boy Scouts of America") filed a "formal complaint and request for investigation, determination and final disposition of awards granted to Lieutenant (junior grade) John Forbes Kerry, U.S. Naval Reserve".
Two days ago, the investigation was completed, and the results were made public. Well, "made public" might be an exaggeration, they were released to the public.
Did the same publications that relentlessly trashed Kerry for the past few weeks give an equal amount of coverage to the results of the investigation? Did the right-wing talk show hosts even mention it in passing? To give you an idea of how prominent that news was, here's how I found out about it: It was buried on page 14 in Saturday's edition of our local "newspaper", the Daily Oklahoman, and given all of two column inches of coverage. Here is that "article" in it's entirety:
WASHINGTON- The Navy's chief investigator concluded Friday that procedures were followed properly in the approval of Sen. John Kerry's Silver Star, Bronze Star, and Purple Heart medals, according to an internal Navy memo.
Vice Adm. R.A. Route. the Navy inspector general, conducted the review of Kerry's Vietnam-era military service at the request of Judicial Watch, a public interest group.
That's it, two faulking sentences to atone for weeks of Kerry-bashing? I had to lean so far to the right just to find that article, I almost fell out of my chair. Apparently, the real news on the pages of the Oklahoman (and most other right-wing publications), can be found buried in the back of the paper. The front page is reserved for the really important topics, like the Sunday edition's lead story, "The Summer That Wasn't", an article about how the weather in Oklahoma this summer was cooler than usual. And Saturday's front page news: an article on the state fair, one about a new fountain in Bricktown, and (of course), a lengthy article about Macauley Culkin's arrest for half a bag of weed and a few Xanax while he was passing through Oklahoma City.
Here are a couple of other articles that I stumbled upon in the cavernous depths of the second section of yesterday's Oklahoman (Again, they are reprinted in their entirety):
WASHINGTON- The Army Reserve is sending to Iraq about 800 soldiers from a unit that normally trains reserve and active-duty soldiers in the United States and has never been deployed in the 45 years it has been part of the Reserve.
Members of the Rochester, N.Y.-based 98th Division will start heading to Iraq next month to help train the fledgling Iraqi army, and it will be there 12 months, Army officials said.
I might be naive, but this looks like real news to me. Our military is stretched so thin that we are calling up troops that have never been deployed before, and it rates only a two sentence mention on page 13? "Fair and balanced", anyone?
WASHINGTON- Campaign mail with a return address of the Republican National Committee warns West Virginia voters that the Bible will be prohibited and men will marry men if the liberals win in November.
Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie said Friday that he wasn't aware of the mailing, but said it could be the work of the RNC. "It wouldn't surprise me if we were mailing voters on the issue of same-sex marriage," Gillespie said.
"The Bible will be prohibited and men will marry men?" Throw in "women fornicating with farm animals" and a couple of "baby killer" comments and you've pretty much blamed the entire downfall of civilization on the Democratic Party. Imagine if the Democratic National Committee did that, we'd be hearing about it until election day. (Correction: make that "we'd be hearing about it until election day, 2008.)
And finally, here's one more from page 13. Actually, by the time I found this article, I checked the page number one more time, thinking that maybe the paperboy switched the front section with the middle section, and that the state fair and fountain articles were really the second section, and the articles I was reading were actually the lead articles in the Saturday edition. No such luck.
By Katherine Shrader
Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON- A senior CIA officer says bad decisions, understaffing, and infighting, among intelligence agencies stifled efforts to stop Osama bin Laden and his network. More than three years after the 9/11 attacks, the agency remains short-staffed, he says.
In an unusually critical campaign for a government employee, Mike Scheur has spent much of the last three months publically criticizing his agency. Most government officials wait until they retire.
In July, Scheur, head of the CIA's bin Laden unit until 1999, published his best-selling book "Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror". Then, he was only identified as "Anonymous".
"There has been no systematic effort to groom al-Quida expertise among Directorate of Operations officials since 11 September," Scheur writes, referring to the CIA's most famous division, it's clandestine service. "Today, the unit is greatly understaffed because of a 'hiring freeze' and the rotation of large numbers of officers in and out of the unit every 60 to 90 days."
Okay, what am I missing here? A senior CIA officer says we're screwing up in the hunt for the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks, and there's a "hiring freeze" in the department that is in charge of catching bin Laden? THIS SHOULD BE SHOUTED FROM THE ROOFTOPS, not buried in the back section of our newspapers!
One thing is clear: the challenge this election will be finding the information to make an educated choice on which candidate to vote for. I, for one, will be looking under every rock and behind every closed door, in search of The Faulking Truth.
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