McCain Misrepresents, Media Looks the Other Way

On the day the Democratic Convention's focus is national security, the McCain campaign issues another ad that grossly distorts the words and meaning of statements by Barack Obama, Talking Points Memo reports.

"The ad's narrator says: "Obama says Iran is a 'tiny' country. 'Doesn't post a serious threat.' Terrorism? Destroying Israel? Those aren't serious threats?"..... But in juxtaposing that truncated quote with "terrorism" and "destroying Israel," the ad badly distorts what Obama actually said that day, and more broadly, also distorts Obama's position on Iran.

Here is the full May 18th Obama quote....

"Strong countries and strong Presidents talk to their adversaries. That's what Kennedy did with Khrushchev. That's what Reagan did with Gorbachev. That's what Nixon did with Mao. I mean think about it. Iran, Cuba, Venezuela -- these countries are tiny compared to the Soviet Union. They don't pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us. And yet we were willing to talk to the Soviet Union at the time when they were saying we're going to wipe you off the planet."

To date the traditional media pay little attention to this steady pattern of misleading and distorted statements. This I find to be among the most worrisome realities of this campaign. Even the shibboleth "Obama Will Raise Your Taxes, repeated ad nauseum in McCain ads, is not questioned, though the Obama tax plan will only raise taxes on the those folks who make more than $250,000 per year and proposes (unrealistically, I would argue) to lower taxes on middle and working class Americans.

In any campaign, the folks who have abandoned any pretense of fairness and accuracy, i.,e., the liars, can get their message out faster than the other side can tell the truth. And if the supposed arbiters in the media largely ignore the misrepresentations, it has a real and often telling effect on the outcome.