I really owe Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal an apology. I uncritically believed the New York Times article that stated Blumenthal had misrepresented his service during the Vietnam era. Blumenthal served in the Marine Corps Reserves and not in Vietnam. The NYT had a pretty damning video which backed up its story.
The campaign of Linda McMahon posted on its website (post subsequently removed) that it had given the story to the NYT and it put up the video. The problem? It put up the whole video. The whole video shows Blumenthal correctly characterizing his service as being during the Vietnam era before he later said in Vietnam. It’s clear that Blumenthal wasn’t trying to mislead this crowd of veterans.
Greg Sargent asked the NYT about the cropped video.
So why didn’t The Times publish the longer vid with the quote of him getting it right? Times spokesperson Diane McNulty emailed a response, claiming the longer vid doesn’t change the story:
The New York Times in its reporting uncovered Mr. Blumenthal’s long and well established pattern of misleading his constituents about his Vietnam War service, which he acknowledged in an interview with The Times. Mr. Blumenthal needs to be candid with his constituents about whether he went to Vietnam or not, since his official military records clearly indicate he did not.
The video doesn’t change our story. Saying that he served “during Vietnam” doesn’t indicate one way or the other whether he went to Vietnam.
Yes it absolutely does change the story, NYT. They should be ashamed of themselves if they were had a sense of shame left. Should we really expect more from the NYT considering they also ran with the highly edited ACORN “sting” videos?
The Times did not merely claim that Blumenthal was trafficking in falsehoods. The original story said that Blumenthal has been so consistently misleading that the idea of his service in Vietnam had become a widely accepted part of his public persona.
So I asked reporters, anchors and columnists to tell me (a) whether they could remember Blumenthal ever claiming to have served in Vietnam and (b) whether they had been under the impression for whatever reason, that Blumenthal had served in Vietnam. Here are the answers so far.
Mark Pazniokas of the Connecticut Mirror, who may have covered Blumenthal more often than anybody else, referred me to his quote in an NPR national story: “Every time he talked about his military record, he was quite clear that he had been a military reservist and never came close to suggesting he was in Vietnam.”
Greg Hladky of the Hartford Advocate, formerly of the New Haven Register and Bridgeport Post, right up there with Paz in Blumenthal coverage: “Never personally heard [Blumenthal] say he was in Vietnam. I knew he had been the the Marine Corps Reserve, talked about that briefly during interview for a profile I did recently, and he never mentioned being in Nam.”
Daniela Altimari of the Courant: “I have not been covering Blumenthal for very long, but I do know that last month, when I asked his campaign about his military service, they said very clearly that he served during the Vietnam era but did not serve in a combat arena.”
McEnroe quotes 6 more Connecticut journalists saying they never heard Blumenthal say he served in Vietnam and were well aware that Blumenthal served in the Marine Reserves.
I think it’s clear that the NYT story is lot less than advertised. I think journalists should use this as a lesson (which they apparently didn’t learn with the ACORN tapes): beware of rightwingers bearing video.