The unexamined Joe Biden

I recently wrote a column about the importance of local journalists, a dying breed, in a media era dominated by internet information swapping that passes for journalism. I love the internet for rapid transmission of news-just not how it makes some of us journalists lazy in the process.

And here is a case in point: While online media has been regurgitating shameless hit jobs on Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, where's the scrutiny of the Democratic nominee? Sen. Joseph Biden has a long career in the Senate. He admitted plagiarizing speeches during his 1988 presidential campaign-has he lifted more? He presided over notably contentious confirmation hearings for Supreme Court justice nominees Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas-has his role in promoting partisanship over court selections been aired? And then along comes this: At a University of Iowa campaign speech last year Biden described the awful details of the 1972 car crash that killed his wife and baby daughter and said that a "guy who allegedly ... drank his lunch" drove the truck that killed them. In one 2001 clip from the University of Delaware, he told students the truck driver "stopped to drink instead of drive." He's apparently used the narrative often enough that The New York Times, The Economist, and NPR have repeated it recently as fact.

And so Rachel Kipp, a reporter for the Delaware News Journal did the obvious thing: She checked the police record and talked to the truck driver's family. Turns out truck driver Curtis C. Dunn was never charged in the accident and the police report shows no evidence of alcohol as a contributing factor. "The rumor about alcohol being involved by either party, especially the truck driver, is incorrect," said Jerome O. Herlihy, a Delaware Superior Court judge who was chief deputy attorney general and worked with crash investigators in 1972.

Biden's fabrication hasn't been without consequences. Dunn died in 1999 and his daughter, 44, said she "burst into tears" when she saw a clip recently of Biden describing her father as a drunk. "My dad was always there for us," she told the News Journal. She phoned Biden's Senate office to complain about the inaccuracy but received no direct reply. Biden spokesman David Wade told the paper that the senator "fully accepts the Dunn family's word that these rumors were false." Biden apparently never looked into the police reports, a perhaps understandable response after such a tragedy. But to use the tragedy on the campaign trail in such a way is almost as tragic as the national media's willingness to overlook it.