‘POW’ Plays Fast, Loose With Fair

If you can’t air Republican agitprop 11 days before the election portraying Sen. John F. Kerry as a Vietnam-era traitor to his country, air a special on the controversy surrounding the agitprop you wanted to air. Making it into a news special called “A POW Story: Politics, Pressure and the Media” will convey fairness and enable you to embed healthy snippets of the original agitprop, all while pushing the idea that the speech Kerry gave against the Vietnam War three decades ago should be in the foreground as the election approaches.

The Republican-leaning Sinclair Broadcasting Group ended up compromising with itself. Sinclair forced 40 of its 62 stations to air as a “news event” part of the factually dubious excoriation of Kerry’s antiwar activities “Stolen Honor” -- in a junky-looking, scattershot hour of political raw hamburger.

“We believe in covering all sides of the story,” anchor Jeff Barnes said at the outset. That included the viewer protests against Sinclair when it was reported that “Stolen Honor” would air in prime time, the howls from the Kerry camp, and the complaints filed against the company with the Federal Communications Commission.

This enabled Sinclair to position itself as a 1st Amendment victim in this entire attention-grabbing imbroglio.

This was a fairer, more “news event-ish” approach to the same partisan goal as was evident in “Stolen Honor,” which is available for download on its own website. That goal was to move the election away from issues that are actually happening now -- the war in Iraq, job losses, mounting healthcare costs -- and haul out the ghosts of the Vietnam War. Was Kerry’s service in Vietnam honorable? Did his anti-war activities cause the prolonged torture of POWs, as “Stolen Honor,” produced by Vietnam veteran Carlton Sherwood, contends?

Sinclair found a few Kerry partisans willing to enter this lion’s den, most notably George Butler, director of “Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry.” But in the end, it was barely more interested in a fair examination of the media’s influence on this election than Michael Moore was in looking for alternate motives for the Iraq war in “Fahrenheit 9/11.” Indeed, Barnes’ repeated statements that Sinclair did due diligence in trying to get Kerry to participate in the broadcast sounded as disingenuous as Moore’s repeated invitations for Bush to show up at his screenings did. If only Kerry, you can’t help but think, had resisted that salute at the Democratic National Convention, we might have been spared this trip down the Vietnam rabbit hole.