Bird's Eye View

My friend, Melissa, once wrote a paper on why Rush Limbaugh is successful. One reason is that he makes predictions (usually obvious) that eventually come true.
Earlier this year, I caught Wesley Pruden in a journalistic lie:

Wesley Pruden's Journalistic Dishonesty
02/05/2004 @ 07:10 PM
Last Friday I managed to get through C-Span's "Washington Journal" phone lines to call Washington Times Editor-in-Chief Wesley Pruden on his journalistic dishonesty for using ellipses in the following quote to misrepresent and distort what John Kerry said during his testimony to the Senate after returning from Vietnam:

John Kerry's military record, lieutenant or not, has so far made him a sentimental favorite with many veterans, but it's a military record that won't withstand the scrutiny that's coming. His slander of the GIs he left behind in Vietnam is not yet well known.
"They ... raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power," he told a Senate committee in 1971 when he was just home from the war, and "cut off limbs, [blew] up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam."
Miserable lies, and he never produced evidence or repudiated the lies. Americans tolerate a lot of hyperbole in election season, but stuff like this will unhorse even a Botox man.
Wesley Pruden is editor in chief of The Times.
source: Washington Times

What Mr. Kerry was referring to was testimony from Veterans themselves in Detroit. John Kerry's actual testimony, without ellipses is:

I would like to talk, representing all those veterans, and say that several months ago in Detroit, we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command....
They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.
Source: Richmond.edu

Mr. Pruden, who responsibly admits that The Washington Times is a conservative paper, demonstrates partisan journalism at its worst. Watch for his version of the quote to be picked up by the mainstream media and repeated by lazy or deadline-driven journalists who won't check the quote. I hope everyone, on both sides of the issues, looks more closely at what journalists say this year. If you read a quote, don't take it at face-value. Please look it up for yourself! Do the work that corporate journalists won't. Just like any potentially dangerous product, WE must hold the press accountable for what they sell us.
Check out the 01/30/04 Wesley Pruden segment online at C-Span.org.

Don't call me Rush, but my prediction in the last paragraph came true--kind of. It's not journalists who are repeating the quote dishonestly. It's now in an ad from the Swift Boat Vets for Truth, and it's also been repeated by pundits (who have become pseudo-journalists nowadays) like Bob Dole. At least CNN responsibly pointed out the misconstruing of the quote in a recent article. I guess not all corporate journalists are lazy.