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Jewish World Review May 18, 2005 / 9 Iyar, 5765 It’s not just Newsweek By Michelle Malkin
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
If you want to hear an earful, ask an American soldier how he feels about our news media. You will invariably hear an outpouring of dismay and outrage over antagonistic and reckless reporting. I have stacks of letters and e-mails from soldiers and their families sharing those frustrations. During the Vietnam War, such sentiments would get packed away private hurts to be silently borne for decades.
But today the Internet has allowed soldiers on the front to disseminate their viewsbreaking through the media's entrenched anti-military bias— in unprecedented ways. In the wake of Newsweek's publication of its unsourced, mayhem-inducing, and now-retracted item about Koran desecration by U.S. military interrogators at Guantanamo Bay, a sergeant in Saudi Arabia immediately responded on a blog called The Anchoress (theanchoressonline.com):
I don't regret serving my country, not one bit, but to have everything I'm doing here undermined by irresponsible journalists leaves me disgusted and disappointed.
Military bloggers across the Web this week echoed the sergeant's disgust with American journalism. And it's not just Newsweek.
It's the New York Times and CBS News and the overkill over abuses at Abu Ghraib prison. It's the Boston Globe publishing porn photos passed off by an anti-war city counselor as proof that American G.I.'s were raping Iraqi women.
It's the constant editorial drumbeat of "quagmire, quagmire, quagmire."
It's the mainstream media's bogus reporting on the military's failure to stop purported "massive" looting of Iraqi antiquities.
It's the hyping of stories like the military's purported failure to stop looting of explosives al Qaa Qaa right before the 2004 presidential election stories that have since dropped off the face of the earth.
It's the persistent use of euphemisms "insurgents," "hostage-takers," "activists," "militants," "fighters" to describe the terrorist head-choppers and suicide bombers trying to kill American soldiers and civilians alike. It's the knee-jerk caricature of American generals as intolerant anachronisms. It's the portrayal of honest mistakes in battle as premeditated murders.
It's the glorification of military deserters, who bask in the glow of unquestioning and largely uncorroborated print and broadcast profiles.
And it's the lesser-known insults, too, such as the fraudulent manipulation of Marine recruits by Harper's magazine. In March, the liberal publication plastered a photo of seven recruits at Parris Island, S.C., under the headline, "AWOL in America: When Desertion Is the Only Option." None of the recruits is a deserter. When some expressed outrage over the deception, the magazine initially shrugged.
"We are decorating pages," sniffed Giulia Melucci, the magazine's vice president for public relations to the St. Petersburg Times.
As Ralph Hansen, associate professor of journalism at West Virginia University and a rare member of academia with his head screwed on straight, observed: "Portraying honorable soldiers as deserters is clearly inappropriate. And I don't see any way Harper's could claim that they weren't portraying the young Marines as deserters. A cover is more than just art. I think that someone had a great idea for a cover illustration and forgot that he or she was dealing with images of real people."
The members of our military are more than just an expedient means to a titillating magazine cover or juicy scoop or Peabody Award. Too often since the "War on Terror" was declared, eager Bush-bashing journalists have forgotten that the troops are real people who face real threats and real bloodshed as a consequence of loose lips and keyboards.
It's not just Newsweek that needs to learn that lesson.
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JWR contributor Michelle Malkin is the author of, most recently, "In Defense of Internment: The Case for Racial Profiling in World War II and the War on Terror". (Click HERE to purchase. Sales help fund JWR.)
© 2005, Creators Syndicate |
Mitch Albom | |||||||||||
