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Voice: The right-wing noise machine

Thursday, November 22, 2007 11:19 PM PST

A letter claimed that Dan Rather’s accusation about President Bush was true. (That he failed to take a required annual medical exam while in the Air National Guard.) But whether that is true or not was not the real issue. The issue was if he did not take it, why not?

It’s painless and done when you have to be there anyway. But even more importantly, that the media deliberately steered negative press away from Bush to a less newsworthy story at that time.

There is only one reason that makes sense for not taking a mandatory medical exam — knowing that he would flunk it. While the primary purpose of the exam may be a health check, it has (especially at that time) another purpose — to detect drug users.

By his own admission, Bush at that time of his life, was somewhat of a rounder and a drinker — and possibly also a bit of a smoker of the weed. So how far fetched is it to assume he dodged the medical exam to evade drug detection?

So what was the more important (read sensationalistic) story in the closing days of a presidential election? Whether Dan Rather failed the journalistic standard of fact-checking recently set so high by Fox News and Rush Limbaugh or whether the presidential candidate touting his religious fervor had dodged a required medical exam because he was a druggie?

OK, that was before he’d been saved, and how would that affect his qualification to be the president? But this is the current U.S. media we are talking about, not Edward R. Murrow or the Manchester Guardian. This media thrives on what inquiring minds want to know — Anna Nicole Smith, Britney Spears, etc, ad nauseum. A truly fair and balanced media that cared about unknown swift-boaters critiquing John Kerry’s medals should have gone bonkers over religious hypocrisy. But instead it focused on Rather’s professional faux pas. (And who just happened to be one of the few liberal voices in the media.)

The point is to illustrate that the mainstream media is not balanced; that it has become little more than a right-wing noise machine and one of the insidious ways its bias can operate to affect our lives.

RON KERR, Ocotillo

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