July 30, 2004, 12:03 p.m.
Trained Seals
The media on the Democrats.

By Tim Graham

Positively everyone has a view of The Speech, so before we consider the media's performance this week, let me just say in a nutshell: It was better than Gore's awful breeze four years ago, better delivered, a little more poetic. But it was capital-H harsh. It's fair for a reporter to give it a passing grade, or note it surpasses everyone's lowered expectations. But anyone who characterizes this convention as gingerly on the Bush-bashing or casts Kerry's address as positive ought to be having their 7-Eleven taquitos paid for by the Kerry campaign.

Take it from George Stephanopoulos, who when the going gets tough, gets tough on the Republicans. Last night, he called it a "blistering attack." Exactly. But he wasn't marshaling the conventional wisdom. In perhaps the week's most comical piece of Kerry spin, Tom Brokaw made a case for his retirement last night: "No Bush-bashing in this speech tonight, but lots of lines that brought the crowd to its feet, especially when he took on the president, the defense secretary and the attorney general who will honor the Constitution, he said, in his cabinet."
What? No Bush-bashing in this speech tonight, but lots of nice lines taking on the president?

Well, Brokaw isn't the only anchor who seems a little tired. Dan Rather summed up Wednesday night by making his CBS White House reporter the candidate for vice president: "With the rhetorical echo of 'hope is on the way,' John Roberts [oops] tonight sounded the theme to hope, optimism, strength, and a time for change." No, Dan, John Roberts is angling for your job, not Dick Cheney's.

Let's look at the big picture. How did the media perform? Like trained seals. Next month, they'll probably look like the violent end of the Siegfried and Roy act.

Ever since John Kerry sewed up the Democratic nomination, the TV networks have taken the fact that Kerry is the second-most-likely man to be president not by scrutinizing him, but by forming a cordon sanitaire to protect him from Republican harm. When Kerry's strategists decided to bury him under a national-TV rock, the networks gladly obliged, and so spent week after week pounding away at the president.

At the week's beginning, the country might have expected that it was now time for Kerry to step into the spotlight and be subject to some tough-minded evaluation. Sadly, the country would have been wrong to expect it. Let's detail some examples of the media's supine spin for Kerry, Kennedy, Cahill, and Company:

1. Liberal Labeling. Almost every speaker demanded that health care be seen as a "right," not an economic good. That means that if I'm unhealthy, I have the right to bankrupt you and the rest of American taxpayers. If that notion is not seriously socialistic, then what is? This is exactly where Hillary's plan lost an axle in 1994.

Even as most speakers whistled past it, the Kerry-cooked platform favors abortion that's safe, legal, and subsidized by the federal government. The party is deeply in thrall to the gay lobby, down to "GLBT" quotas for delegate representation. Ninety-five percent of the delegates hated the Iraq war with a passion. Reporters shied away from the L word, sticking to Obama the "centrist," John Edwards the "southern populist," and John Kerry the Cub Scout. No one can imagine the media hiding the word "conservative" when the Republicans convene.

2. Accuracy. The first challenge for any fact-checker at this convention would have been Bill Clinton's oh-so-precise numbers on Monday night about 300,000 kids being thrown on the street out of their after-school centers and more. There were also many rhetorical jabs that were not very technically sound or substantiated, like Jimmy Carter's snide implication that unlike Kerry, George W. Bush hadn't "showed up" for military service. At Republican conventions, anchors have been quick to suggest, "hmm, we'll correct some errors tomorrow night." The Democrats get a free pass on this. No one imagines that will happen when the Republicans gather.

3. Negativity. Starting with Brokaw's inanity last night, anchors and reporters often take the "Sunshine Boys" approach to Democratic speeches — all about how they were upbeat and inspirational and brought down the house — since their inner Democrat glows like E.T. as they follow along.

It will be up to others to remind the public of how Al Sharpton suggested Bush was a segregationist, how Ron "Throw the Embryo" Reagan suggested that a vote for Bush was a vote against science and reason and for "ignorance" and outdated theology, how Bill Clinton suggested Republicans prefer their inner-city youth wandering the streets with assault weapons, and how John Kerry suggested Dick Cheney was a secrecy-obsessed tool of polluters. In New York, the TV gang's hypersensitivity to Republican attack will have them simmering at a Monday afternoon recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance: Surely, this is an attack on Democratic patriotism!

This is the media game: We will submerge the negative angles on Kerry, for the Republican idea of what's news must be avoided lest we appear to our liberal friends to be (gasp) Republicans. When the Republicans try to bring the negative angles to the surface, we will then cluck, "How ugly can this campaign get?"

4. Complete Clinton-Evading Inconsistency. This is one area where Republicans really choke as they watch at home, seeing Kerry or Jimmy Carter lecture about the central importance of "truth" or "trust" in the White House and suggest that only those who have served in the military have any real authority as commander-in-chief. No reporter wanted to tackle how this matched their rhetoric in the Clinton era, or how Kerry voted on the president who lied under oath in a civil suit.

No, Kerry can lecture about someone else's attorney general upholding the Constitution, while he voted that the nation's chief law-enforcement officer can mangle the truth in court. The media wandered around in a fog of complete amnesia about 1992-2000. But in New York, they're likely to have amazing recall of how Dick Cheney voted in the House in the 1970s, or how George W. Bush once drew a DUI ticket.

5. Vietnam and the Band of Others. Perhaps the most glaring and outrageous omission of convention coverage came to a head last night. For months and throughout this week, the Kerry biography often skips directly from war stories of Kerry boldly beaching the boat to kill the enemy or fishing Jim Rassman out of the Bay Hap River to his 1984 Senate race. Every supportive member of his "Band of Brothers" has been milked on the campaign trail, in TV ads, and now on the convention podium.

But the Band of Others, the Vietnam veterans and swift-boat captains who knew John Kerry then and despised how he came home and poured rhetorical gasoline over all their reputations on television and Capitol Hill — calling them war criminals who killed, raped, tortured, and pillaged — are being cropped out of every picture, left out of every newscast.

In 1992, the liberal media earned their label by overtly campaigning in their coverage for Bill Clinton in perhaps the most blatant journalistic electioneering and scandal-deep-sixing in the television era. But as 2004 unfolds, another shameless campaign of Bush-bashing and Democrat-boosting may surpass it. A lot may be expected of the Bushies in New York. But expectations of fairness from the liberal media cannot be any lower.

— Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and an NRO contributor.