One of Connecticut’s few remaining left of center media personalities – Colin McEnroe – has ripped the NY Times article on Richard Blumenthal to shreds with his blog update from yesterday. McEnroe is a long-time columnist for The Hartford Courant and had a very long-running radio show in the afternoons on WTIC AM 1080 in Hartford. McEnroe currently has an afternoon radio show on NPR in Connecticut after getting canned by WTIC when they moved rightward at the end of 2008, even though McEnroe was their highest rated show.
But, Colin rips the NY Times in his blog post, basically because they only have one actual documented case of Blumenthal saying that he was "in" Vietnam, not that he served "during" Vietnam, which he has said hundreds of times over the years.
McEnroe also rips the writer, Raymond Hernandez, for not revealing his source when the NY Time has promised to be more open about sources after the Jayson Blair fiasco. The blog post from McEnroe has two links to audio of Hernandez and McEnroe appearing on air together yesterday.
Some blurbs from Colin’s usually interesting blog – To Wit – after the flip:
Having had a little time to review the New York Times reporting on Blumental and think about it a little bit: I have a few observations some of which will probably get me flamed as a Blumenthal-protecting hack, but so be it.
- Raymond Hernandez's story is paper-thin and overplayed. No question, he's got one video clip in which Blumenthal says he was in Vietnam. And he's got, five years earlier, a quote attributed to Blumenthal where he says "we" in way that's at least open to multiple interpretations. And that's it. That -- and those recollections by Jean Risley UPDATE who has apparently repudiated the Times's reporting -- are the whole basis for his huge above-the-fold page one story. In all the other times that Blumenthal put his military service on the record, as far as I can tell, he's been truthful about who he was. Certainly, in his debate with Merrick Alpert, he clearly said he did not serve in Vietnam.
http://blogs.courant.com/...
McEnroe also goes on in his blog to challenge Hernandez and others to produce evidence from all of the media who have covered Blumenthal over the years about him inflating his military service, and calls into question Hernandez for his ethics related to the motivation of his sources.
It also seems that Jean Risley of the Connecticut veterans association has repudiated a lot of the Times reporting as well.
There is a lot more juicy stuff at the link.