Posted on 09/19/2009 6:26:42 AM PDT by Travis McGee
To Set The Record Straight, first pubished in 2008, is much more than a history of the 2004 presidential race, and the effects the Swiftboat veterans had on that campaign. TSTRS uses the Swiftboat veterans' story to focus upon the role the mainstream media has played in shaping American public opinion over the past forty years, from the Vietnam War until the recent past. When Senator Kerry decided to make his military record a central part of his campaign, the Swiftboat veterans who knew him the best were angered and sickened. They had had enough, and they decided literally “to set the record straight.” Presidential candidate John Kerry unwittingly helped to pull the curtain back on the left-wing media machine, when he was directly confronted by scores of his old military associates.
In the words of Navy SEAL captain and Vietnam veteran Larry Bailey, “More than any other person, John Kerry is responsible for the false image of Vietnam veterans as dysfunctional misfits and crazed killers, and we intend to change that image.”
During 1970 and 1971, while the Vietnam was still raging, John Kerry began his first campaign of political self-promotion, as a leader of the hard-left “Vietnam Veterans Against the War” and “The Winter Soldiers.” With the enthusiastic support of that era’s solidly leftist media, Vietnam veterans were smeared as baby killers and maniacal butchers. John Kerry was the public face and the leader of that campaign of slander and libel against American veterans. These campaigns of slander were enthusiastically broadcast into every American home by the three television networks, and they set the image of Vietnam veterans for the next thirty years. With strong old-media support, John Kerry then ran for Congress and the Senate based on the fame he earned as the nation’s worst slanderer of Vietnam Veterans.
However, by 2004, the leftist media’s monopoly control of opinion information had been breached by a “new media,” consisting of internet forums and blogs, talk radio, and the new Fox television network. John Kerry was to discover to his shock that it was not sufficient that his old allies in the old-media were still solidly in his corner. When the Swiftboat vets began to challenge Kerry’s dubious record of heroism in combat, and attack his treasonous behavior after he left Vietnam, the old-media maintained an airtight news blackout of these new players on the political scene. This time, the old-media blackout wasn’t sufficient to prevent the truth from reaching the voters. The way Americans received their news had changed in the new millennium, and the old-media blackout was no longer an effective bulwark against the truth, as it had been from the 1960s until very recently. Eventually the old-media was forced to respond to the Swiftboat veterans charges, first dismissively and then derisively, but never convincingly. All that the old-media accomplished by their full-throated defense of Kerry the “war hero,” and their attacks on the Swiftboat vets, was to absolutely convince the majority of Americans of the left-slanting nature of their reporting.
The Swiftboat veterans victory against the old-media was not only a decisive event, and a David versus Goliath victory, it was paradigm altering. Gone forever where the days when a Walter Cronkite could pretend to be an objective reporter, and be called, “The most trusted man in America.” In “To Set the Record Straight,” we even see how Cronkite’s successor at CBS news, Dan Rather, put the final nail in the coffin of old-media news control and opinion manipulation. Rather, who was a product of Vietnam-era misreporting and disinformation, tried to counter the effects of the Swiftboat veterans with his own attack on George W. Bush’s Vietnam-era Texas Air National Guard service. CBS anchor Dan Rather breathlessly reported on a series of “newly discovered” purported TANG memos, stating that Bush was a marginal and delinquent pilot officer. As soon as the dubious memos were briefly shown on television, they were immediately dissected and proven to be forgeries by unpaid members of the “new media,” who were “mere” bloggers and members of internet forums, with expertise in the typewriters and printing methods available in the early 1970s. The exposure of Dan Rather as a fraud and a hack over his “memogate” behavior led to his dismissal in disgrace.
“To Set The Record Straight” is much more than an outstanding account of the 2004 presidential race, and the role of the Swiftboat Veterans. It’s the first history of the role the leftist old-media played so successfully in manipulating the opinions of Americans during and after the Vietnam War. The book brilliantly analyzes and describes how the old-media ultimately became a dinosaur, brought crashing down through the efforts of a handful of Swiftboat vets, using the new-media channels of the internet, talk radio and FOX news.
To Set The Record Straight was written by Scott Swett, and freeper Tim Ziegler. Swett created the SwiftVets.com and WinterSolder.com websites during the 2004 campaign, and was central to the Swiftboat veterans' success.
“As others on the thread have noted, we have a long way to go before the old media wing of the DNC is completely marginalized.”
Old media has been pissed to no end since the Swifties decimated Kerry. One FReeper has a great tagline:
” To infuriate a conservative, tell him a lie. To infuriate a liberal, tell him the truth”
“My thought is that, having enjoyed a monopoly for so long (similar to IBM until the 80’s) they became fat and convinced of their wonderfulness. Insofar as they never had to defend a position, they forgot how.”
Spot on!
This is exactly why Travis McGee's review is so appreciated. It is vital that we get word out about a victory for the conservative cause. That's what To Set the Record Straight does. It recounts a victory and gives the reader the ability to reject the leftist memes about the Swift vets with authority.
Regards,
TS
No doubt finding the image you want with a search engine is annoying. Google’s lefty bias that actually cuts off certain people and topics only makes it more frustrating. I often have to think of the right recipe of tags before I get a picture I want.
Thanks for the ping. This is a very good review.
Your comment is correct: the old media is far from dead. Their constant drumbeat of slander drove public approval of President George W. Bush from 90% to 20% — and their worship of the new messiah was instrumental in the election of 2008.
We freepers have been clued into the old media for many years, but for many non-political types, the blatant bias exposed during the Swiftboat vets episode caused them to take off their blinders.
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