This year a war hero and statesman is running against a fake cowboy for the US Senate in Virginia. When the right-wing smear machine goes after Jim Webb, if the mainstream media fails again to protect the truth, vigilant Americans in Virginia and across the country will hold them accountable.
In his new book, "Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over For Bush," Eric Boehlert dissects the Beltway media's culpability during the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth smear campaign from the 2004 campaign and concludes the episode "likely delivered Bush the cushion he needed to win in November" and "represented an embarrassing new benchmark for campaign season reporting." "Lapdogs" holds the press accountable for the central role it played in enabling a smear campaign that consumed the crucial campaign month of August 2004 -- "a media monsoon that washed away Kerry's momentum coming out of the Democratic convention."How, for instance, the Washington Post published 13 page-one Swift Boat stories in 12 days, most of which failed to address the key fact that the Swift boat allegations -- that Kerry lied about his Vietnam War record -- were riddled with errors and compounded by the veterans' fanciful, ever-changing stories. Despite the lack of evidence to substantiate their claims, which were floated 35 years after the fact and bankrolled by partisan Republicans, the press refused, in real time, to call out the Swift Boat allegations as a dirty trick.
"Lapdogs," in bookstores next week, charges that the press, spooked by allegations of liberal bias, has been "afraid of the facts and the consequences of reporting them" during the Bush years.