I don't think this has been diaried already; it didn't come up in my searches.
NYT TV reviewer Alessandra Stanley has written a review of "Stolen Honor" that amounts to a strong endorsement of the film. Even though it acknowledges a few "distortions" about Kerry, the overall thrust of the review is overwhelmingly positive.
Here's how it starts:
Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal," the highly contested anti-Kerry documentary, should not be shown by the Sinclair Broadcast Group. It should be shown in its entirety on all the networks, cable stations and on public television.
Seriously, can you think of any other show that has ever been endorsed this strongly by the NYT? Even when I'm talking about the best shows I've seen, I don't think I'd ever say that something was so good that it must be shown on every network.
The rest of the article isn't much better:
Sinclair, the nation's largest television station group, reaching about a quarter of United States television households, backed down this week and announced that it would use only excerpts from the 42-minute film as part of an hourlong news program about political use of the media, "A P.O.W. Story: Politics, Pressure and the Media.'' That's too bad: what is most enlightening about this film is not the depiction of Mr. Kerry as a traitor; it is the testimony of the former P.O.W.'s describing the torture they endured in captivity and the shock they felt when celebrities like Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden visited their prisons in North Vietnam and sided with the enemy.
Notice that this repeats the "backed down" meme that the entire media seems to have embraced. Also, notice how the sentence construction implicitly states that the depiction of Kerry as a traitor is "enlightening"--just not as enlightening as other aspects of the film.
The article even admits that the point of the film is to attack John Kerry:
This film is payback time, a chance to punish one of the most famous antiwar activists, Mr. Kerry, the one who got credit for serving with distinction in combat, then, through the eyes of the veterans in this film, went home to discredit the men left behind.
Yet later says that this isn't the "real subject" of the film:
Those kinds of distortions are intended to hurt Mr. Kerry at the polls. Instead, they mainly distract viewers from the real subject of the film: the veterans' unheeded feelings of betrayal and neglect.
Furthermore, Stanley seems almost upset at the fact that the film wasn't more damning toward John Kerry, and implies that there is other damning material out there that the filmmakers couldn't find:
The documentary shows Mr. Kerry's 1971 Senate testimony, in which he famously reported that fellow soldiers had "cut off ears," among other atrocities. But the filmmakers were not able to dig up more indicting material from homemade movies or news clips from the era. The picture from an antiwar demonstration, where Mr. Kerry stood a few rows behind Ms. Fonda, is blown up portentously, but there are no shots of them together. The only candid shot of Mr. Kerry gathering material for the Winter Soldier hearings shows him solicitously asking a veteran why he felt the need to speak.
So there you have it. An NYT critic's mostly positive review could help give this film the mainstream legitimacy it would otherwise lack.
Well, we have the transcript, thanks to the hard work of one of our fellow Kossacks. We know that this is first and foremost a partisan hatchet job against John Kerry, not a balanced attempt to explore the pain of the veterans. The importance of debunking this film's distortions about Kerry has become much more important now. The SCLM is now working with the right-wing fringe to make sure that this movie has as much perceived credibility as possible.