The Chronicle has spent a fair amount of column space reporting on the donators to the 527 group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.
Indeed, given the opening sentence in today’s article from D.C. bureau reporter John Frank, one can’t help but suspect that some sort of agenda is work at the newspaper:
Two Texas businessmen with a history of supporting Republican causes gave $3 million last week to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a group trying to sink the presidential campaign of Democrat John Kerry.
“Sink” the campaign of Senator Kerry? That sounds suspiciously like a value judgment, which journalists allegedly learn to avoid in j-school.
Why not simply describe the organization neutrally, as a 527 group that promotes its perspective on the Senator’s Vietnam and post-Vietnam record?
Furthermore, why focus exclusively on one 527 group when there are so many, and the spending has been directed so disproportionately towards defeating a President who calls Texas his home?
The editors can answer, of course, that it’s of particular interest to their readers what Texans are contributing to 527 organizations. Fine. Why is it not of similar interest what other individuals are contributing to defeat a President who makes his home in Crawford and who served two terms as governor of Texas?
Fortunately, one need not rely on dinosaur media to track who’s spending what against whom in terms of 527 organizations. Indeed, the TaxProf Blog posted a nice summary of 527 spending today, with all sorts of links to back up the research. Interestingly enough, clicking on the link to Top 20 Individual Contributors to 527 Groups shows only one Texan on the list: one Linda Pritzker of Houston, TX, who has contributed $900,000 to the Joint Victory Campaign 2004, a liberal umbrella organization devoted to defeating the “extremist agenda of the Bush Republicans” (note: the Chronicle has asserted previously that Pritzker actually lives in Montana, but the organization through which she makes her contributions is incorporated in Houston). Indeed, the top two contributors alone (Peter Lewis and George Soros) have donated a combined $26 million to defeat a sitting President whose home state is Texas.
The fact that the newspaper that missed Enron (and apparently also missed an important phone call about Dan Rather’s fake memos) is so disinterested in individual liberals spending so many millions to defeat a President who calls Texas his home state, but is so much more interested in a group with an obvious personal score to settle over Senator Kerry’s Vietnam record, is telling.
It’s also illustrative of why trust in the dinosaur media is at historic lows.
