Media Mythbusters Blog

Cross-posted at Confederate Yankee:

Several people have forwarded me a link this morning to the Democratic National Committee ad against John McCain that shows two American soldiers at the moment an explosion goes off beside them.

The soldiers are on screen for just a split-second, just long enough for viewers to see that there was an explosion, but not long enough to know if the soldiers pictured survived uninjured, if they were wounded, or if they were killed (note: Both soldiers survived. See final update below).

More than 3 full decades after the last U.S. soldier left Saigon, the party of Bill Ayers still revels in the imagery of blowing up U.S. soldiers as part of their political expression.

Update: RNC slams ad as deliberately distorting what McCain said (a fair charge) and demands that the networks pull the ad off the air.

As for the source of the video clip, we’re a little closer to running that down — it was used in Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911, a movie completed no later than April of 2004. The clip came from the first year of the war.

Additional Update: Charlie Foxtrot notes that the same networks who placed restrictions on 9/11 imagery did not apparently have the same problem with this Democratic National Committee ad.

And because it matters, both U.S. soldiers survive the blast (h/t Political Punch).