Truth in the Media - Part One

Cindy Sheehan has been grabbing a lot of press these days. John Hinderaker at Power Line takes a look at one of the reporters covering this story:

If the Facts Don't Fit, Make Them Up
No one has contributed more to the enshrinement of Cindy Sheehan as an antiwar icon than AP reporter Angela Brown. Tonight, however, Brown stepped over the line with an outright misrepresentation of Sheehan's history. Brown's article, which likely will appear in hundreds of newspapers, describes Sheehan's return to Crawford, Texas. It begins:

A woman whose son was killed in Iraq returned to Texas Wednesday to resume her anti-war protest near President Bush's ranch after a weeklong absence to care for her ailing mother.

The article concludes with an outright whopper:

Sheehan and other grieving families met with Bush about two months after her son died last year, before reports of faulty prewar intelligence surfaced and caused her to become a vocal opponent of the war.

As anyone who has followed this story knows, this claim is utterly false. Sheehan has always been a "vocal opponent of the war;" her opposition had nothing to do with "reports of faulty prewar intelligence." By her own account, as we noted here, Sheehan was bitterly opposed to the war before her son Casey re-enlisted in August 2003:

I begged Casey not to go. I told him I would take him to Canada. I told him I would run over him with a car, anything to get him not to go to that immoral war. *** The U.N. weapon inspectors were saying there were no weapons of mass destruction. So I believed all along that this invasion was unnecessary and that there was some other agenda behind it besides keeping America safe.

So, far from having been turned into a "vocal opponent" some time after her son's death, Ms. Sheehan already considered the war "immoral" before he re-enlisted in 2003, and she never did believe the intelligence about WMDs.

John then goes on to point out a couple other outright whoppers in Cindy's accounts of her talks with her son including this "fact":

Sheehan, a Catholic youth minister for eight years, never wanted Casey to join the military. But he did after being misled by his recruiter, she said. Although he also opposed the war, he didn�t try to back out of his duty.

And John comments: (Brown is AP reporter Angela Brown)

Brown must have known about Casey's re-enlistment, but she relates the story as though Casey was "misled by his recruiter" and thereupon was sent directly to Iraq. It's a little hard to claim, of course, that a soldier re-enlisted because he was misled by a recruiter, so, once again, Casey Sheehan's re-enlistment is discreetly dropped from the story.