From Paul Krugman’s column today:

All the credible evidence, from military records to the testimony of those who served with Mr. Kerry, confirms his wartime heroism. Why, then, are some veterans willing to join the smear campaign? Because they are angry about his later statements against the war. Yet making those statements was itself a heroic act – and what he said then rings truer than ever.

The young John Kerry spoke of leaders who sent others to their deaths because they wanted to seem tough, then “left all the casualties and retreated behind a pious shield of public rectitude.” Fifteen months after George Bush strutted around in his flight suit, more and more Americans are echoing Gen. Anthony Zinni, who received a standing ovation from an audience of Marine and Navy officers when he talked about the debacle in Iraq and said of those who served in Vietnam: “We heard the garbage and the lies, and we saw the sacrifice. I ask you, is it happening again?”

Mr. Kerry also spoke of the moral cost of an ill-conceived war – of the atrocities soldiers find themselves committing when they can’t tell friend from foe. Two words: Abu Ghraib.

Let’s hope that this latest campaign of garbage and lies – initially financed by a Texas Republican close to Karl Rove, and running an ad featuring an “independent” veteran who turns out to have served on a Bush campaign committee – leads to a backlash against Mr. Bush. If it doesn’t, here’s the message we’ll be sending to Americans who serve their country: If you tell the truth, your courage and sacrifice count for nothing.

It also worth noting that Kerry didn’t levy any accusations himself, but was merely the spokesperson for the Winter Soldier meeting in Detroit. He was conveying the stories and claims of the veterans that spoke out there. One might say he was representing them, you know, to Congress and to the country.

All this talk about media bias has caused the media to ignore their prime mandate: to find the truth and report the truth. If it makes one side look bad, well, that’s too bad. Balance isn’t just regurgitating what both sides of a controversy are saying. It’s also not leaving issues like this to the editorial section. The news folks need to actually report the truth of what’s happening. Unfortunately, they don’t… instead, they call balance conveying both sides of a story, even when one side is demonstrably false.

Well, people are starting to wake up, I guess. Today’s LA Times also carried a story with this interesting section:

The technique President Bush is using against John F. Kerry was perfected by his father against Michael Dukakis in 1988, though its roots go back at least to Sen. Joseph McCarthy. It is: Bring a charge, however bogus. Make the charge simple: Dukakis “vetoed the Pledge of Allegiance”; Bill Clinton “raised taxes 128 times”; “there are Communists in the State Department.” But make sure the supporting details are complicated and blurry enough to prevent easy refutation.

Then sit back and let the media do your work for you. Journalists have to report the charges, usually feel obliged to report the rebuttal, and often even attempt an analysis or assessment. But the canons of the profession prevent most journalists from saying outright: These charges are false. As a result, the voters are left with a general sense that there is some controversy over Dukakis’ patriotism or Kerry’s service in Vietnam. And they have been distracted from thinking about real issues (like the war going on now) by these laboratory concoctions.

E.J. Dionne takes a different tack, which I don’t necessarily think is the best strategy:

The media have to do more than “he said/he said” reporting. If the charges don’t hold up, they don’t hold up. And, yes, now that John Kerry’s life during his twenties has been put at the heart of this campaign just over two months from Election Day, the media owe the country a comparable review of what Bush was doing at the same time and the same age.

If all the stories about what Kerry did in Vietnam are not balanced by serious scrutiny of Bush in the Vietnam years, the media will be capitulating to a right-wing smear campaign. Surely our nation’s editors and producers don’t want to send a signal that all you have to do to set the media’s agenda is spend a half-million bucks on television ads.

I just don’t really care about what they did when they were in their 20s. I do think the best and right thing for the media to do is to report factual conclusions: “In our opinion, the Swift Boat Vets For Truth have no leg to stand on, as there is no documentary evidence nor eyewitness they can produce that corroborates any of their claims. We will of course report on this story again if more information surfaces.” Instead, we had CNN with this as the headline story last night on their web site… ugh

Of course, you can always count on the Daily Show to put things in their proper perspective.