A call for criticism

I enjoy David Shaw’s Sunday column and generally agree with his year-end rap [“When the Journalism Itself Was the Bad News,” Dec. 19], but I disagree with the way he characterizes election coverage.

Because we live in California, a safely blue state -- never mind the huge division between coastal and inland precincts -- we were spared the vitriolic and slanderous attacks on Sen. John Kerry’s war record by the so-called “Swift Boat Veterans.” (As a disclosure, I did not vote for Kerry in the general election.) Those attacks proved to be dishonest and entirely inaccurate, but the media treated the issue as a he said/she said story rather than seeking the story behind the story, until the charges gained a kind of validity reserved for choice urban myths.

The media largely failed to unpack a blatantly biased, well-financed and coordinated attack on Kerry, and failed because of temperament, fear, confusion in the midst of an active campaign, bias or laziness (please pick as many as apply). The silence proved deafening and it undermined the election. That, in and of itself, deserves special castigation, which Shaw did not provide.

Shaw should have called them on the carpet. Why have a bully pulpit and not hurl effective thunderbolts?

Peter Cortelyou

Santa Barbara