Kranish and the Boston Globe should post Kerry's records for public review

Today's Boston Globe contains two articles by staff reporter Michael Kranish that discuss Navy records pertaining to Senator (and failed presidential candidate) John F. Kerry.  The articles say that the Globe obtained the records pursuant to a Standard Form 180, signed by Sen. Kerry, which named the Globe as the party to whom the records were to be directly released. In one article, Mr. Kranish asserts:

The lack of any substantive new material about Kerry's military career in the documents raises the question of why Kerry refused for so long to waive privacy restrictions. An earlier release of the full record might have helped his campaign because it contains a number of reports lauding his service. Indeed, one of the first actions of the group that came to be known as Swift Boat Veterans for Truth was to call on Kerry to sign a privacy waiver and release all of his military and medical records.

The second article focuses on Kerry's Yale undergraduate grades and concludes that Kerry was a "lackluster student" whose grade average was "virtually identical" to Dubya's. (Although in fact Kerry's grades appear to be slightly worse, both can fairly be characterized as "lackluster.")

Although both articles make interesting reading, I can't help feeling considerable skepticism about their conclusions.

Mr. Kranish and the Globe have indeed sometimes been critical of Sen. Kerry. But at other times — in particular with their trashy and unethical treatment of Captain George Elliott — they've skewed facts in ways that have been extremely beneficial to Sen. Kerry. And sometimes they've simply made incredible and inexcusable factual bloopers that likewise worked to Sen. Kerry's benefit — as, for example, in their biographical book "John F. Kerry: The Complete Biography by the Boston Globe Reporters Who Know Him Best," in which they described Sen. Kerry as "a man who was severely wounded in combat [and] who watched men under his command die." As I wrote last summer, the first statement is absolutely false. Kerry's wounds were trivial, but this egregious factual mistake about them wasn't. The second statement is unsupported and almost certainly an exaggeration.

Moreover, despite Mr. Kranish's subjective conclusion that the records he's reviewed contain no "substantive new material," his articles utterly fail to address, either in detail or in summary form, some of the most controversial questions about Sen. Kerry's war service — including in particular the questions regarding Sen. Kerry's discharge.

The Boston Globe should immediately post all the records, and the signed Standard Form 180, as .pdf scans on their website. Perhaps they already plan to do so, and simply haven't gotten the scans made yet. But even were there no past examples to create doubts about the Globe's and Mr. Kranish's objectivity and accuracy, those members of the public who are inclined to study the actual source documents — rather than accepting as gospel Mr. Kranish's pre-digested conclusions — should have the chance to do so.

If the Globe and Mr. Kranish feel themselves to be precluded from posting the source documents because of some lack of further authorization from Sen. Kerry or other privacy concerns, they should disclose the facts about that.

The Ra^thergate memos were only debunked when the public was able to examine them. Perhaps Mr. Kranish's and the Globe's analysis of the new records has been fair, balanced, accurate, and complete. But there's no excuse for preventing the public from seeing the source documents.

(Mr. Kranish's email address is [email protected], and the Globe's online feedback form can be accessed through this link. And there are many, many links to blogospheric reactions similar to mine at Michelle Malkin's, Captain Ed's, and Tom Maguire's blogs.)

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Update (Tue Jun 07 @ 7:30pm): Hugh Hewitt and N.Z. Bear also had reactions very similar to mine.