AP Headlines we like
Posted on September 25th, 2004 by
Bush Twists Kerry’s Words on Iraq
More please!
Campaigning by bus through hotly contested Wisconsin on Friday, Bush sought to counter recently sharpened criticism by Kerry about his Iraq policies:
* He stated flatly that Kerry had said earlier in the week “he would prefer the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein to the situation in Iraq today.” The line drew gasps of surprise from Bush’s audience in a Racine, Wis., park. “I just strongly disagree,” the president said.
But Kerry never said that. In a speech at New York University on Monday, he called Saddam “a brutal dictator who deserves his own special place in hell.” He added, “The satisfaction we take in his downfall does not hide this fact: We have traded a dictator for a chaos that has left America less secure.”
Who woke up the press? Seriously, lately I’ve been noticing a small but real increase in Journalism-related program activities from the SCLM. Is this the beginning of a renaissance for the profession, or just a temporary response to (accurate) critisism of their fealty to W?
“Is this the beginning of a renaissance for the profession…”
I hope so. But I have a feeling that any journalist who calls Bush on his mistakes is going to be out on their ass shortly afterwards.
That was pretty out of the ordinary in the current media environment.
I was disappointed, though, to see the need for “balance” in the second half of the article, where the author accused “Kerry … of playing fast and loose with Bush’s words. The problem was those examples were not comparable because (a) they did not come from Kerry personally, and the whole point of the article was that Bush was twisting Kerry’s words; and (b) they were made up inaccuracies:
“The e-mail from campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill accused the president of having ‘no plan to get us out of Iraq’ …. [But] Bush has a plan for Iraq ….”
Isn’t it obvious that a plan to get out of Iraq is different than a plan for Iraq.
Great. Now maybe they can all go back and un-fuck-up seven weeks of misquoting Kerry (see URL – scroll down).
Whoops – here it is:
http://dailyhowler.com/dh092504.shtml
Of course, after the wingnuts howled AP made the headline “Fair and Balanced” by changing it to “Bush, Kerry Twist Each Other?s Words on Iraq.”
Make that “Bush, Kerry Twisting Each Other’s Words.”
They changed the headlines.
I hate our fucking media.
Serious question regarding terminology: Wasn’t Bush’s statement more than “twisting words”? It seems more like …what’s the technical term for this? — more like an outright lie. Misquotes, quotes out of context, suspect paraphrasing, elisions of convenience — when can we call statements created this way what they are: lies.
This just pissed me off — a morning marveling that the headline was what it was, followed by an afternoon gnashing my teeth that they had changed it.
So many people I meet go for the default “They’re both bad,” shtick. It allows them to ignore everything. Most of them don’t vote, or vote Republican. This is the most obvious version of playing to that stereotype.