THE BUSH DODGE--THIS TIME HE, HIS MEDIA WHORES, HAVE BEEN CAUGHT AT IT

Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting
MEDIA ADVISORY :
Media Should Probe Bigger Questions About Bush's Record
September 14, 2004
In the past week, a handful of stories have cast doubt on whether George W. Bush fulfilled his National Guard obligations 30 years ago. Reports bythe Associated Press (9/7/04), Boston Globe (9/8/04) and U.S. News & WorldReport (9/20/04) have all raised new questions about Bush's military service. Though each of these stories has been accompanied by significantofficial documentation, developments in the investigations by AP, U.S.News and the Boston Globe have been largely sidetracked by the fixation onquestions about the authenticity of documents aired on CBS on September 8.Weighing the credibility of evidence is an essential function ofjournalism. Experts have weighed in on both sides on the authenticity of CBS's so-called Killian memos (New York Times, 9/14/04; Washington Post,9/14/04); efforts to establish the origin of those documents should continue.

However, news outlets that focus on this tangent of the National Guard story to the exclusion of the unchallenged new evidence that has recently emerged are neglecting another essential journalistic task: holding powerful people and politicians accountable.

In the wake of the stories scrutinizing Bush's stateside service during the Vietnam era, it's hard to imagine a better situation for the White House than to have the press corps ignore a range of evidence raising questions about Bush's fulfillment of his obligations while obsessing singularly on one set of documents from one story. A review of some of the information uncovered in recent news reports:--The September 7 Associated Press story, based on new records the White House had long maintained didn't exist, debunked a Bush assertion that he'd skipped his flight physical because the jet he was trained on was becoming obsolete.

According to AP, Bush's unit continued to fly the same jets for two years after the missed physical.--The September 8 Boston Globe expose concluded that Bush failed in his military obligations by missing months of duty in Alabama and in Boston. As the Globe revealed, Bush had signed contracts on two separate occasions swearing to meet minimum Guard requirements on penalty of being called upto active duty.

According to the military experts consulted by the Globe, Bush's Guard attendance was so bad

"his superiors could have disciplinedhim or ordered him to active duty in 1972,
1973 or 1974."

--U.S News & World Report (9/20/04) reviewed National Guard regulationsand reported that the White House has been using "an inappropriate-- and less stringent-- Air Force standard in determining that he had fulfilled his duty." The magazine noted that Bush committed to attend at least "44 inactive-duty training drills each fiscal year" when he signed up for the Guard, but that Bush's own records "show that he fell short of thatrequirement, attending only 36 drills in the 1972-73 period, and only 12in the 1973-74 period."

The magazine explains that even by using the White House's preferred methodology for measuring Bush's service, he still fell short of those minimum requirements.

--An NBC Nightly News segment (9/9/04) played a clip of Bush being interviewed in 1988, acknowledging that favoritism sometimes played a part in getting into the National Guard. While he had said that he didn't think that happened in his case, he did voice his approval of thepractice: "If you want to go in the National Guard, I guess sometimes people made calls. I don't see anything wrong with it." (He continued with a remark that could be taken as an insult to the men and women whodid face combat during the war:

"They probably should have called theNational Guard up in those days. Maybe we'd have done better in Vietnam." (ignorant future resident)

Even CBS's September 8 broadcasts, the subject of so much scrutiny, included important information beyond what is contained in the disputed memos. On the CBS Evening News and 60 Minutes II that night, CBS featured Ben Barnes, the former speaker of the Texas legislature, describing how he used his political influence to help a young George W. Bush bypass a waiting list and secure a coveted position in the Guard. In addition, the CBS stories also featured an interview with Robert Strong, a former colleague of Bush's commander, Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, the purported author of the disputed documents.

Strong described the pressure Bush's commander was working under: "He was trying to deal with a volatile political situation, dealing with the son of an ambassador and a former congressman.... And I just saw him in an impossible situation. I felt very, very sorry because he was between a rock and a hard place."

Instead of asking the White House tough questions about the well-documented information contained in these reports, media have focused almost exclusively on the claims and counter-claims made about the Killian memos-- as if the discrepancies over Bush's service record stand or fall based on this one set of disputed documents. It's the equivalent of covering the sideshow and ignoring the center ring.

**If you'd like to encourage the media to follow up on these stories, youcan find contact information on FAIR's website: http://www.fair.org/media-contact-list.html

(But you've got to give the chimp_junta credit. They can dodge and squirm around an issue from every direction but the middle. And they have a corps of so-called reporters, squishy and rotten to the core, which is afraid they will get the "HELEN THOMAS" treatment. Remember her? Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, 80-year old great-grandmother of all reporters who has covered 8 White Houses? She got RUN OUT OF THE PUBLIC'S WHITE HOUSE BY THE CURRENT RESIDENT BECAUSE SHE KNEW HOW TO ASK QUESTIONS.)