Colmes at the Convention Night 1: Even Counting Colmes, There Were Fewer Liberals
Reported by Ellen - August 31, 2004 -
First the good news: As best as I can recall, I don't think Fox News Live with Alan Colmes played any more of any speech than at the Democratic National Convention. It did seem to me that Fox made sure to catch the big applause lines of tonight's speakers whereas it often cut away just before during the Democratic Convention. We'll see if this patterns continues for the rest of the convention.
Now the bad news: The guest line-up tilted decidedly conservative.
Here's the count. I apologize for not getting more names. I'm on double News Hound duty simultaneously monitoring Alan Colmes and MSNBC:
In the conservative column: A former Miss America, a country western singer, a conservative radio host, a conservative Rabbi, a Republican congressman. The total is 5.
In the non-conservative column and not necessarily liberal: Kato Kaelin (who didn't really rebut what the Republicans were doing), a Kerry campaign spokesperson and a veteran backing up Kerry's Viet Nam record. The total is 3.
Unknown: The politician interviewed during the first hour of the program but even if he was not a Republican, the line-up would still be unbalanced.
Once again, Colmes was the most knowledgeable and effective counter to the Republican spin. However, he let slide two points:
1. An indignant person argued that Democrats are trying to say that Bush's National Guard service was not honorable. Colmes agreed that Bush served honorably. In fact, this is not at all clear, as you can see from Colmes' own words in Where's the Balance. More importantly, what's wrong with Bush's service is not just that he served in the National Guard. It's that he appears to have used his father's influence to jump over a list of others who wanted to get in, then he got excused for a year to work on a campaign in Alabama and then he disappeared altogether. All of this Colmes knows full well yet he let the accusation pass.
2. The conservative rabbi who knocked the Sunday protesters said they numbered 120,000. In fact there were about 500,000 according to the New York Times, which Colmes seemed not to know. However, he did a very effective job of making the point that the few problems were by far the exception in an overwhelmingly peaceful and dignified demonstration.
