Have the Mainstream Media Ignored Our Heroes?

That's a disgraceful statement.
There is such a huge difference between a hero and a war criminal that they do not even exist on the same plane. I've read some idiotic things on this board, but I never expect I will see anything worse than this.

 

To reasonable people Twob', you're right. But I lived through the lionization of Rusty Calley, the butcher of My Lai, and the Pentagon-enforced non-personhood of Hugh Thompson, a real hero who stopped the slaughter there, so I'm less sanguiine than you are about Jay's point in regards to the inevitable rhetoric over the next couple of years.

 

Speaking of the MSM and the Pentagon's Orwellian wordplay, can someone please explain to me why the two dead soldiers in Iraq have always been referred to as "missing." They "went missing" and now they are "found."

I thought they were soldiers wearing uniforms who were captured in battle. Didn't that make them prisoners of war who are now killed in action? Why is the MSM allowed to use the sanitized "missing," as if they wandered off the trail in Yosemite?

Where's the outrage from the "support our troops/support our President" bunch?

 

Fenian - you are good example of main stream media that seems to want to revel in the negative military stories instead of celebrating the heroic one. It does seems in many ways natural for the liberal media to want to magnify negative military stories.

 

I know you are just trolling here, Boom, but that last sentence is just so wrong.

Your good, ol' conservatives buddies don't have any problems sending these heroes to war, lying about how long they will serve, refusing to supply needed armor and working hard in congress to cut their benefits, do they?

It's a lot easier to hail them as heroes than to treat them as heroes. That can get downright expensive.

 

Boom --
Stick to my example.
Hugh Thompson was a genuine American hero. He interposed his troops between Calley's men and the Vietnamese Calley was preparing to slaughter. He stopped a freaking massacre. He should have been all over the news as an example of what the US was fighting for in SVN. But it wasn't the media who ignored him. He was dropped down the memory hole by the Pentagon, which even denied him the medals he'd earned in other action. It wasn't a liberal media that ignored him. It was his own brothers in arms in DC.
What I am saying is that the "Where is all the good news?" line is going to go along with an awful lot of demonizing over the next two years. It happened before and we should watch out for it and not flal for it.

 

Hugh Thompson is a hero as was John Paul Vann- The liberal media loves those type of heroes because it help them validate their anti war bias. A current example is the Jarhead guy Anthony Spooford ( sp)

In same vain Carlos Hathcock was a true hero in Nam but you here little of him in the main stream.

 

Wow, didn't realize that either of my posts said, "There are no good stories in Iraq." Maybe I should go back and read them. Or maybe you should. Or maybe you should have before you lashed out at me.

So, do you think the media has fixated too much on the bad calls in the last NBA Finals game? Should we instead be talking about how Dwyane Wade stepped up and made the free throws at the end and that great bank shot at the end of regulation.

I said it before. It's the nature of the media to report the negative more than the positive. And as others have pointed out, it's hard to report stories about school being rebuilt or other things that you don't witness. How are we supposed to trust the military's account of an event after the Tillman incident? Should we just blindly say, well, they said it happened this way, so it must have. And reporters, ar damn few of them, leave the safe zones because they're safety can't be guaranteed. Far from it.

I can only assume it's because if the headline read "Three Marines killed by roadside bomb whiile on mission trying to find non-existent weapons of mass destruction that were a false premise for this war" or "Three marines killed but we got 10 of their guys on a raid of suspected insurgents," it wouldn't fit the headline specs. To get all the information you want in a headline, it'd have to be six columns, 18-point. Headlines, because they are headlines, are hard to fit a lot of context in. To say that newspapers need to include all the subtext is just to say that newspapers will never make you happy unless they conform their reporting to your world view. In this case, I'd suggest you start reading the Washington Times.

Like I said, it's hard to report things without getting out there. And right now, it isn't safe to go many places. Reporters generally stay in safe areas anymore because there have been so many kidnappings. Any more, you can't trust what you're told. And it's hard to say a reporter should go out and risk his life to check something unless it's a big story. Some stories are easier to get than others, but, oike I said, if you trust the military's account of any incident after what happened with Pat Tillman, you're fooling yourself.

 

What's the big deal about rebuilding a school that was blown up in the war that we started?

 

You also have made it pretty clear that unless you agree with the views of the outlet we cite, you'll just say it's not reliable. I'm guessing you know how to use Google. Use it. It's a waste of anyone's time to put up sources and have you put up some right-wing site that says those sources are wrong.

And it's funny that a guy who quotes a story where Cap Weinberger quotes Brent Bozell. And ignores the fact that the story was co-authored by a guy named Wynton Hall. Usually when a famous guy's name is next to a co-author, the co-author wrote it and the famous guy said, "Hey, sounds good to me."

Of course, pointing out that someone other than Weinberger may have wrote it takes away that whole "But Weinberger graduated magna cum laude from Harvard" argument, don't it?

 

And I noticed after my post that Football bat made my point about the dangers for journalists, and in less words than me I think.

 

Boom --
Please.
You're pushing it now.
Nobody knew about John Paul Vann until Sheehan wrote his book a few years ago and Thompson was a non-person. Of course, John Kerry was a decorated hero and we saw what that was worth.