This from Major General Buckman (Ret.)
My niece, Katelyn, stationed at Baluud , Iraq was assigned, with others of her detachment, to be an escort/guard for Martha Raddatz of ABC News as she covered John McCain's recent trip to Iraq. Katelyn and her Captain stood directly behind Raddatz as she queried GI's walking past. They kept count of the GI's and you should remember these numbers. She asked 60 GI's who they planned to vote for in November. 54 said John McCain, 4 said Obama and 2 said Hillary. Katelyn called home and told her Mom and Dad to watch ABC news the next night because she was standing directly behind Raddatz and maybe they'd see her on TV. Mom and Dad of course, called and emailed all the kinfolk to watch the newscast and maybe see Katelyn. Well, of course, we all watched and what we saw wasn't a glimpse of Katelyn, but got a hell'uva view of skewed news! After a dissertation on McCain's trip and speech, ABC showed 5 GI's being asked by Raddatz how they were going to vote in November; 3 for Obama and 2 for Clinton. Not one mention of the 54 for McCain!
On 7 April 2008, ABC News aired a
report about how closely U.S. military personnel stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan are following the current U.S. presidential campaigns. The segment featured reporter Martha Raddatz questioning service members in Iraq about what issues were important to them and which candidates they were supporting. In June 2008 the above-quoted e-mail account began circulating, claiming that Raddatz had interviewed some 60 soldiers in Iraq, 54 of whom expressed a preference for the Republican presidential candidate, Senator John McCain -- but none of those 54 interviews was used in the aired segment, which instead featured 5 different interviewees expressing a preference for one of the two Democratic candidates, Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
As for what material actually made it into the finished segment, the e-mail is largely true, although it's a tiny bit off in claiming that there was "not one mention of the 54 [soldiers] for McCain": The beginning of the aired segment included six brief interviews with soldiers, three of whom expressed a preference for Barack Obama, two for Hillary Clinton, and one for John McCain.
As to the question of whether Martha Raddatz really interviewed 60 service members in Iraq and found 54 of them to be John McCain supporters, that's difficult to independently verify without access to outtakes (or to someone who has viewed them). It's probably fair to say, though, that any random, representative sampling of U.S. military personnel in Iraq would find a much higher proportion of support for John McCain (over either of the two leading Democratic candidates) than one in six!
Whether this segment reveals some deliberate agenda on the part of ABC to mispresent the political preferences of U.S. military personnel is an argumentative and subjective issue. One the one hand, one side claims that the ABC report wasn't
supposed to be a representative sampling of party preferences; it was supposed to illustrate that American troops are following the presidential campaign closely and evaluating candidates based on their positions on
all the issues, not just the war in Iraq. Hence, the preponderance of interviews showing soldiers who were not (as many might expect) reflexively endorsing the Republican candidate, John McCain, even though he would almost certainly be more supportive of continuing their current mission than either of the Democrats.
On the other hand, critics maintain that by showing only one soldier's expressing a preference for the Republican candidate (prefaced by a laconic Martha Raddatz voice-over intoning, "there
were some McCain backers ..."), by separating the portion of the report in which soldiers discussed their candidate preferences from the portion in which they discussed what issues (other than the war) were important to them, and by identifying the report with titles such as "Whom Are Our Troops Endorsing?" and "Surprising Political Endorsements by U.S. Troops," ABC News presented the piece as being a survey of American troops' presidential preferences while offering viewers a distinctly skewed perspective of those preferences.
Based on the wide circulation of the original e-mail and the flood of (mostly negative) comments about this report that have been posted to ABC's web site, we expect that ABC News and/or Martha Raddatz will be offering some insight into this now-controversial segment in the near future.
http://www.snopes.com/politics/war/raddatz.asp
