SwiftVets.com

[FredRum]

Surprise, Surprise! She confirms that all the major wire services are ignoring the SwiftVets, so smaller papers are picking up the slack on their own.

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http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/reader/9403578.htm (registration required)

On Kerry, news services play catch-up

Posted on Sun, Aug. 15, 2004
YVETTE WALKER, READERS' REPRESENTATIVE

Some of you think the paper isn't doing its job of covering Sen. John Kerry and the controversy surrounding his military record.

Last week, readers called and wrote in, saying The Star hasn't covered critics' assertions that:

1) Kerry's claim of being in Cambodia on Christmas of 1968 was a lie; and that

2) One of the swift boat veterans says he was misquoted by the Boston Globe, and is still fully behind the anti-Kerry movement.

True, The Star hadn't published either of these news items as of Friday. By Friday afternoon however, the paper corrected itself and assigned a reporter to write the story. It ran Saturday.

Why the delay? The answer has to do with credibility. The Star had been waiting for credible sources to move stories over the news wire, which is how most of the news about national politics gets in the paper. When these sources were slow to act, editors felt they had to.

Star editors point out that last week they asked national news wires to provide stories about statements from Kerry and the swift boat veterans. “We are sensitive to the need to address this,” said Darryl Levings, national editor at The Star.

The only criticism here might be that editors waited too long to act. How long is too long? It's a difficult question to answer, and the fact that editors recognized the need for the story and assigned the task is laudable. Readers should also be praised for voicing concerns about the lack of a story.

The Star subscribes to several news wire services — the aforementioned credible sources — including Knight Ridder (The Star's parent company), The Associated Press, and the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and The Washington Post wire services.

On Friday, a Google News search turned up dozens of references to the Kerry stories. Many of them were on fringe news and personal Internet pages, sites that The Star and other mainstream media don't recognize as credible by themselves. Such news must be verified, preferably with two independent sources. That doesn't always happen on Internet sites, talk radio and cable TV news shows — even though such electronic media often are far ahead of other traditional news media in reporting controversy.

Sometimes the early reports do get it right. When that happens, traditional news media look like slowpokes. As with other celebrity and political news stories, electronic media frequently move faster than print news does. That's because they don't always have the system of checks and balances newspapers require.

The readers' representative can be reached at (816) 234-4487 from 8:30 a.m. to noon weekdays, or at

readerrep@kcstar.com.
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[gilliam]

Time for the Kansas City Star and other city newspapers grow up and quit waiting for the Washington Post and NY Times (who seem to now be bought and paid for by the Democratic party) to do their reporting for them.

[ccr]

This is great news.

It shows that SBVT is winning. The grass roots movement and UFC is getting legs and the media doesn't have a choice -- the story is bigger than they are.
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Whose side is John Kerry really on? Take this quiz and decide for yourself.

http://www.learnthat.com/quiz/