Stolen Honor

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Stolen Honor is a 45-minute video documentary that was released in September 2004. It features interviews with a number of American men who were prisoners of war in North Vietnam, who claim they suffered increased maltreatment while prisoners as a direct result of John Kerry's Fulbright Hearing testimony in April 1971. The subtitle of the film is Wounds That Never Heal; on the production company's website the complete title is given instead as Stolen Honor: John Kerry's Record of Betrayal.

Stolen Honor was a project of Red, White and Blue Productions, whose public affairs are managed by Quantum Communications ([1]), a company owned by Republican lobbyist Charles Gerow ([2]). The production company's website states that

"Stolen Honor investigates how John Kerry's actions during the Vietnam era impacted the treatment of American soldiers and POWs. Using John Kerry's own words, the documentary juxtaposes John Kerry's actions with the words of veterans who were still in Vietnam when John Kerry was leading the anti-war movement." [3]

Mark Nevins, a spokeman for the Kerry presidential campaign, stated, "This group is the poor, distant cousin of the Swift Boat Veterans for Bush. It's comprised of people with questionable backgrounds whose sole mission in life is to smear John Kerry." [4] (Nevins was making a derisive reference to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, an anti-Kerry organization.) One of the ex-POWs interviewed in Stolen Honor is in fact Kenneth Cordier, who was required to resign as an advisor to the Bush campaign after it was disclosed that he was simultaneously working for SBVT, which as a 527 group -- a tax-exempt organization that is created primarily to influence the nomination, election, appointment or defeat of candidates for public office -- is barred from coordinating its activities with any candidate's campaign.

According to conservative commentator Deroy Murdock,

"It presents POWs who argue that John Kerry's fallacious spring 1971 claims that U.S. atrocities occurred 'on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command' amplified their agony under America's North Vietnamese enemies." [5]

The producer of Stolen Honor was journalist, Vietnam War veteran, and private military corporation executive Carlton Sherwood, who was part of the 1980 Pulitzer Prize-winning Gannett News Service team.

Sherwood is Executive Vice President and Director of Communications of the WVC3 Group, Inc., a security and defense corporation headquartered in Reston, Virginia. Sherwood previously worked for Republican Tom Ridge when he was governor of Pennsylvania. Some time later, with Ridge serving as Secretary of Homeland Security for George W. Bush's administration, that agency awarded Sherwood a federal contract to create a government anti-terrorism website.

In 1992, the PBS television series Frontline reported that Inquisition, Sherwood's "purportedly independent investigation" of the Unification Church, had been subject to prior review and revision by its subject. [6]

In early October 2004, it was announced that Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns television stations in nearly one-quarter of the United States, had ordered all of its stations to air Stolen Honor in the days leading up to the November 2 presidential election.[7] This has raised concerns that such a direct criticism of Kerry would violate the "equal time" provision of the Communications Act that governs airtime for political candidates. FCC chairman Michael Powell has declared that such an action would not be a violation of the provision. A former FCC chairman, Reed Hundt, responded that Powell was offering "tacit and plain encouragement of the use of the Sinclair airwaves to pursue a smear campaign." A spokesperson for the company said that the airing would be followed by a panel discussion, which Senator Kerry would be asked to join, possibly as an effort to satisfy the equal time clause. The Kerry campaign declined the invitation. Sinclair did not accept Michael Moore's offer for free broadcast of his documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 to balance its reporting.

Sinclair's own Washington Bureau Chief, Jon Lieberman, condemned the planned broadcast of the video in an interview in the Baltimore Sun: "It's biased political propaganda, with clear intentions to sway this election ... For me, it's not about right or left -- it's about what's right or wrong in news coverage this close to an election."

Shortly after making this statement, Lieberman was fired by Sinclair. Sinclair Vice-President Mark Hyman attributed the firing to Lieberman, also the television chain's lead reporter, "speak[ing] to the press about company business." Lieberman contends that he was fired for his criticism of the plan to air Stolen Honor, a plan that he said originated with Hyman.

After the announcement to air Stolen Honor the public controversy caused Sinclair stock to drop considerably, and over 100 advertisers pulled out their ads. In response, Sinclair announced that it had never intended to air Stolen Honor in the hour slot in the first place, indicating that they might instead show clips of the video in a discussion panel format.

At the time of the controversy surrounding the airing of this documentary, more than 100 Democratic members of the United States Congress asked the FCC to consider the propriety of the broadcast, and Senator Ted Kennedy asked the Justice Department to investigate. The Democratic National Committee filed a formal complaint with the Federal Election Commission.

More recently, on October 23rd, 2004, Roger L. Simon reviewed "Stolen Honor" and pronounced it as "...mediocre and employs shopworn techniques of documentary melodrama". [8]

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