Reply #5: Myth, schmyth. It's a "swift boat" style facade ...

[meegbear]

FOX News Channel devoted an entire segment of the September 28 edition of Special Report with Brit Hume to an interview with the president of a conservative front group who attacked Senator John Kerry while pretending to analyze the voting preferences of "this year's crucial target voter," the so-called "security moms."

Carol A. Taber, president of Family Security Matters, presented Bush campaign attacks on Kerry as though they were nonpartisan public opinion data. Taber claimed that married women who once voted Democratic have embraced President George W. Bush for his handling of terrorism but produced no empirical evidence for her claims. In fact, Taber's harsh attacks on Kerry -- along with her total lack of credentials as a public opinion or demographics expert -- indicate that she is a partisan posing as an impartial analyst.

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For a supposed expert, Taber's knowledge of basic "security mom" facts and figures was noticeably lacking. When Hume asked Taber, "How many security moms is it estimated that there are?" Taber answered: "We won't probably know until the votes have been cast." Taber noted, however, that "we can guess in the sense that ... in the last presidential election, Al Gore carried women by 11 points. And today, there was a Washington Post poll, which you probably saw where President Bush is leading women now by three points."

But as MMFA has pointed out, the September 27 Washington Post/ABC News poll that Taber mentioned revealed that so-called "security moms" are "no more likely than other voters to name the war on terrorism or Iraq as their top voting issue." The same poll found that "only about one in four married women with children -- 24 percent -- rated the war on terrorism as their major concern."

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http://mediamatters.org/items/200409290009