My Man Bob Dole

Bob Dole ran for office during a Presidential election that didn’t make military service a prerequisite for winning a campaign. The more cynical (like me) would probably opine that this was because the veteran in question was a Republican, while the individual who didn’t serve was a Democrat. Here’s part of a transcript of an interview with Bob Dole on MSNBC:

JOE SCARBOROUGH: You ran for president. It?s easy for me to talk about media bias, but did you see media bias in 1996? And if so, how widespread is it?

DOLE: It?s widespread. I mean, you look at the number of stories written about or on the three big networks at night and ?The New York Times,? ?The L.A. Times,? ?The Washington Post,? all the big newspapers. How many dozens of stories they?ve reported about George Bush and the National Guard, and now they had to rush to the defense of John Kerry.

?The New York Times? last Friday had a front-page story, trying to discredit all these other Vietnam veterans, some who?ve been wounded seriously, all of whom served honorably. And many were decorated. And they?re cast as a bunch of liars or paid off by the Bush people. And that?s the kind of coverage you would get from the so-called mainstream media.

President Bush is going to go out and rebut this, for the most part, with paid advertising. He doesn?t have ?The New York Times? every day. if you added up the value of all ?The New York Times? propaganda, it would probably be $3 or $4 million.

Dole gets to the heart of the issue here. If Big Media is going to drop the ball in such a spectacularly obvious way, and then try to hide the damn thing, it’s a problem.

Thanks to Instapundit for the pointer, who asks, “Was the press more professional decades ago, or was it just harder to tell when they cheated?”