Clueless Hacks
I was just watching David Gergen and Kathleen Hall Jamieson on NewsHour talk about the "controversial" Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ad. It's amazing how clueless these hacks can be. See, mainstream media (translation: the New York Times and ABC/CBS/NBC et al) held back from commenting on the substance of the SBVT claims while cable news and talk radio (translation: FOX and Rush Limbaugh) were busying themselves talking up such "smears." That was the responsible thing to do ---and it paid off because the claims were false. Oh, and the Bush campaign is behind all of it. And it's gonna backfire. Blah, blah, blah.

What's bothering the shills for Big Media is that their monopoly on The Truth is disintegrating. Sales of the major dailies are declining, but not as fast as the viewership of the network evening news broadcasts. That's because there are many other choices now for our information. The blogosphere is now the place where much of my own news consumption begins. And people who follow the news online are often days ahead of those who only hear national news from Peter Jennings and Katie Couric. Call it pre-emptive news-gathering. Call it the ombudsman culture.

John Kerry is getting pounded on his war (and anti-war) record a hundred different ways. The fact ---the fact--- that the New York Times had an embargo on Kerry's now-discredited Christmas in Cambodia bullshit for more than a week doesn't make it any less of a lie. That any of the major media outlets wants to ignore these daily blows against Kerry's credibility only reflects discredit on them and, by extension, their candidate.

But it gets better, folks. Tomorrow, the second SBVT ad officially comes out and is going to do fantastic business. All the Gergens and Jamiesons in the world couldn't stop the devastation being done to Kerry's credibility by his own words. Just don't expect to learn about it from the [respectable] mainstream media.