With public opinion polls showing that if the presidential election were held today, Sen. John Kerry would defeat President George Bush, Republicans have launched a Big Lie campaign to distort the presumptive Democratic nominee’s record on military spending. Obviously, they believe that if you tell the same lie over and over, people will eventually believe it.

That would be bad enough. But to make matters worse, some of the country’s best journalists are allowing these lies to go unchallenged.

Research by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a New York-based media monitoring organization, reports that Kerry is being depicted as one who is repeatedly voting against military funding when that’s not the case.

For example, the report notes that Ralph Reed, the former head of the Christian Coalition and now a Bush-Cheney campaign strategist, appeared on CNN (2/3/04) and described Kerry’s record in the Senate as “voting to dismantle 27 weapons systems, including the MX missile, the Pershing missile, the B-1, the B-2 stealth bomber, the F-16 fighter jet, cutting another 18 programs, slashing intelligence spending by $2.5 billion, and voting to freeze defense spending for seven years.”

Blitzer reacted by turning to Ann Lewis of the Democratic National Committee and saying, “I think it’s fair to say, Ann, that there’s been some opposition research done.”

NBC anchor Tom Brokaw swallowed the line when he said on MSNBC [3/2/04], “…the vice president just today was talking about [Kerry’s] votes against the CIA budget, for example, intelligence budgets and also weapons systems. Isn’t he going to be very vulnerable come the fall when national security is such a big issue in this country?”

The usually reliable Judy Woodruff was transformed into a parrot in an interview with Rep. Norm Dicks of Washington state [2/25/04]. She said, “The Republicans list something like 13 different weapon systems that they say the record shows Senator Kerry voting against. The Patriot missile, the B-1 bomber, the Trident missile and on and on and on.”

In his response, Dicks did what Woodruff, Brokaw and Blitzer had failed to do: He admitted that Kerry was being attacked for a single vote on the Pentagon’s 1991 appropriations bill. No member of the media trio pointed out that 16 senators voted against that bill, including five Republicans, or that 10 of the 13 purported votes against military spending were part of the 1991 defense appropriations bill.

Woodruff was so caught off guard by Dicks’ response that she said, “Are you saying that all these weapon systems were part of one defense appropriations bill in 1991?”

That’s exactly what he was saying.

Vice President Cheney told Fox News’ Brit Hume: “What we’re concerned about, what I am concerned about, is [Kerry’s] record in the United States Senate, where he clearly has over the years adopted a series of positions that indicated a desire to cut the defense budget, to cut the intelligence budget, to eliminate many major weapons programs.”

Hume failed to note that Cheney was criticizing Kerry for a position he had taken around that same period.

In fact, Fred Kaplan of Slate, the online site, noted that Cheney served as the elder George Bush’s secretary of defense. He quotes Cheney as telling Congress during that period: “You’ve squabbled and sometimes bickered and horse-traded and ended up forcing me to spend money on weapons that don’t fill a vital need in these times of tight budgets and new requirements.”

He was particularly critical of members of Congress who engage in pork barrel politics by pressuring the Defense Department to move forward on the development of the M-1 tank and the F-14 and F-16 fighters and other weapons that “we have enough of.”

Although military spending represents only 20 percent of the federal budget, it eats up approximately half of all federal discretionary spending.

With so much being spent on the military, growing federal deficits fueled by tax cuts that primarily benefit the wealthy, Bush is particularly vulnerable on domestic issues. A recent USA Today/CNN poll shows Kerry leading Bush 52 percent to 44 percent, largely because the public believes Kerry will do a better job of handling such issues as the economy, health care, education and Social Security. Bush’s overall rating in the USA Today poll was 49 percent, matching his lowest rating in late January.