Still not satisfied? Then read this.
Hardball has a blog, called Hardblogger. I found an interesting bit of backstory on Bill Rood's bearing witness to the SBV's false witness.
You know Bill Rood by now, right? the Chicago Tribune editor that was the only officer on the only other boat that was on the scene when Kerry got that Silver Star.
Anyway, Keith Olbermann says
It's not big news outside of the midwest, but the Trib has been locked, for weeks, in a death-grip struggle over a panoply of bewildering issues, with the city's Democratic Mayor, Richard M. Daley. In Chicago, where pure partisan politics has devolved into a primary-based beauty contest, Daley is a small-d Dem. But outside of it, he's as Democratic as John Kerry or Bill Clinton. There are no questions about where his loyalties or his national self-interests lie. You will see his late father cast a vote for George Bush sooner than you'll see him do it (not impossible given Illinois's history of post-mortem election returns, but still unlikely).
The Daley/Tribune battle has grown so fierce that the city, on inconclusive structural evidence, has threatened to padlock Wrigley Field, home of the Tribune's wholly-owned baseball money-machine, the Chicago Cubs. This is war between Daley the Democrat and the vast Tribune Corporation.
And the Trib's suits ran Rood's historical valentine to Kerry anyway.
News organizations are populated by humans, most of them politically aware, and many of them politically slanted. But news organizations are owned, virtually uniformly, by gigantic corporations that are, almost by charter, conservative. I worked for Tribune -- they're conservative. I worked within baseball -- it's conservative.
So there's the political affiliation back-story to the Rood pieces. The stories wind up being pro-Kerry, and they're printed while the Conservative corporation for which the editors who approved them work, is locked in a steel-cage match with a Democratic mayor who wants to screw their Conservative ballclub. I think the non-partisanship of the reporting passes the smell test.
