2004
• August 20 — “The Times Attacks the Swift Vets”
The Times finally devotes a front-page story to the Swift Boat veterans challenging John Kerry’s Vietnam war record—but it follows a pattern reminiscent of the Clinton scandal days in focusing on the subjects making the attack instead of the actual anti-Democratic charges raised, an angle clear from the headline, “Friendly Fire: The Birth of an Attack on Kerry.”
August 24 — More Anti-Swift Bias from a Paper “Calling Itself” Objective
Elisabeth Bumiller and Kate Zernike’s front-page story on Bush denouncing outside political ads includes a dismissive description of the Swift Boat Vets. Also: What about the “web of ties” between the left-wing Moveon.org and the Kerry campaign?
• September 7 — Reviving an Anti-Bush Sr. Urban Legend
Kate Zernike revives an anti-Bush Sr. urban legend, the myth that during the 1992 campaign, George H.W. Bush marveled at a grocery-store scanner as if he’d never seen one before.
******
2003
The Times’ white alleged reporter who dramatically botched a story, was Kate Zernike; the story was on the reaction, or lack thereof, to the June, 2000 U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding the Boys Scouts of America’s ban on gay scout leaders. Kate Zernike’s August 29, 2000 front page story, reported that “corporate and governmental support for the organization had slipped markedly,” citing the withdrawal of monetary support by Chase Manhattan, Merill Lynch and Textron. As William McGowan chronicles in Coloring the News, Zernike was found to have written one falsehood after another, including her suggestion that many parents of boy scouts were opposed to the policy, and that, as McGowan put it, “a grassroots rebellion … could be in the offing.”
“Not a week later, though, the Times was forced to run a mortifying, five-paragraph correction undercutting almost every one of Zernike’s contentions.”
Was Kate Zernike fired? Not at all. Was she reprimanded? Of course not. On the contrary, if anything, in supporting the campaign against Boy Scouts of America led by the mainstream media’s “gay mafia,” Zernike’s lies enhanced her standing at the Times.
******
January 24, 2007
Kate Zernike’s front-page profile of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (featuring a large picture of Pelosi shaking Bush’s hand at last night’s State of the Union address) opened with a celebration of Pelosi’s femaleness and ends with “poignant commentary” by the left’s new favorite Bush fighter, Democrat Sen. James Webb of Virginia.
******
May 29, 2006
Kate Zernike Reporting For Duty
The New York Times’ reporter of things John Kerry saluted Kerry’s latest version of his service in Vietnam in her lengthy, uncritical and uninformed recitation of Kerry’s “evidence” that he was wronged by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.
Ms. Zernike’s crack, or should I say cracked, reporting skills apparently do not include even including the few facts she does know.
Her latest piece of puffery begins:
John Kerry starts by showing the entry in a log he kept from 1969: “Feb 12: 0800 run to Cambodia.”
He moves on to the photographs: his boat leaving the base at Ha Tien, Vietnam; the harbor; the mountains fading frame by frame as the boat heads north; the special operations team the boat was ferrying across the border; the men reading maps and setting off flares.
“They gave me a hat,” Mr. Kerry says. “I have the hat to this day,” he declares, rising to pull it from his briefcase. “I have the hat.”
Omitted from Ms. Zernike’s story is any mention of what she said when interviewed by CNN’s Aaron Brown on August 23, 2004:
BROWN: …The one issue the Senator has some problems on I think is this Cambodia, fair?
ZERNIKE: Right. Right.
BROWN: He says he was there on Christmas and the record doesn’t seem to support that.
ZERNIKE: No, in fact, if you look in “Tour of Duty” by Douglas Brinkley, which is his biography, or a biography of the Senator, he’s somewhere else on December 25th, on Christmas Eve and on Christmas Day. Brinkley himself says there’s some question Kerry may have been in Cambodia later.
So, now, Kerry reveals one line from his journal – which he refuses to share with the public — to say he was, according even to the New York Times’ display of the supposed evidence, “35 miles from the border.” No mention by Zernike of Kerry’s previous false claims to have been in Cambodia on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day.
The expose in Unfit For Command of Kerry’s exaggerations and lies in his staged Brinkley bio relied upon Kerry’s own words and the differing eyewitness and knowledgeable accounts of those who also served in the same unit.
Sorry, Ms. Zernike, your salute to John Kerry rings as hollow as his at his nomination.
Remember when that asshat jaunted around the bay with 2 or 3 of his swift boat buddys posing as heros and then the salute at convention and the “REPORTING FOR DOODEY”?
LoL! L0L!
what a jerk
bttt