Media Whores of the Week

Taken from Eric Alterman's great blog, Altercation:

ABC News lies for Bush: Here is the direct quote from Sunday night's broadcast, thanks to Todd Gitlin: "Reporters investigating Mr. Bush's military career found that, while he missed some weekends of training, he later made up for them and was eventually honorably discharged." That sentence is a falsehood. In fact, as I explained in Newsday, only one reporter, the Boston Globe's Walter V. Robinson, investigated the charge with any kind of probity and he found that Bush missed not "weekends of training" but approximately eighteen months. A May 2, 1973, Annual Performance Report noted that he has "not been observed at this unit" during the previous year and could not be evaluated.

His superiors apparently believed that he had been training in Alabama, but nobody can turn up any evidence of his having bothered to show up. And the general who commanded that unit, William Turnipseed, told Robinson he didn't remember even seeing the young man. Moreover, Bush did not submit to the required annual physical examination and lost his right to actually fly any planes. Bush was "honorably discharged" in pretty much the same fashion he was "cleared" for insider trading; in other words, regardless of whether he was guilty. Shame on ABC for its dishonest shilling for the White House, misinforming its viewers without doing any investigation of its own.