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Posted on 07/12/2005 12:46:22 PM PDT by rhema
This is a belated Fourth of July column (superseded by the state shutdown). The headline isn't a prelude to a column justifying why the Islamists hate Westerners so much that they're pouring into Iraq to kill our soldiers (along with innocent fellow Arabs, including Egyptian diplomats). Or defending the sleeper cells planted to blow up Madrid, London and who knows where next. Rather, it's about why most Americans, particularly soldiers, hate the media.
I decided to become a journalist when I was a soldier. I was in the U.S. Navy in the early and mid-1980s — "the glory years," as I like to say, a reference to President Ronald Reagan. As part of my duties, I went to some of the world's hot spots.
While sailing in the South China Sea, my ship picked up some refugee boat people on a rickety raft that I wouldn't take out on Como Lake, much less try to float across the Pacific Ocean. One of the survivors, shortly after coming up the accommodation ladder dripping wet, grabbed me (the nearest sailor), hugged me as tightly as his strength would allow, and could only murmur "thank you" through sobs of joy.
I'd then come back to the U.S. and read accounts of places I'd just been — in papers like the New York Times and Washington Post —that bore no resemblance to what I'd seen. There was one exception: the Wall Street Journal editorial page. I began reading a column called "Thinking Things Over" by Vermont Connecticut Royster, one of the legends of that august page. He would later become a mentor — a God, really — and I eventually worked there.
I'm reminded of why I became a journalist by the horribly slanted reporting coming out of Iraq. Not much has changed since the mid-1980s. Substitute "insurgent" for "Sandinista," "Iraq" for "Soviet Union," "Bush" for "Reagan" and "war on terror" for "Cold War," and the stories need little editing. The U.S. is "bad," our enemies "understandable" if not downright "good."
I know the reporting's bad because I know people in Iraq. A Marine colonel buddy just finished a stint overseeing the power grid. When's the last time you read a story about the progress being made on the power grid? Or the new desalination plant that just came on-line, or the school that just opened, or the Iraqi policeman who died doing something heroic? No, to judge by the dispatches, all the Iraqis do is stand outside markets and government buildings waiting to be blown up.
I also get unfiltered news from Iraq through an e-mail network of military friends who aren't so blinded by their own politics that they can't see the real good we're doing there. More important, they can see beyond their own navel and see the real good we're doing to promote peace and prosperity in the world. What makes this all the more ironic is the fact that the people who are fighting and dying want to stay and the people who are merely observers want to cut and run.
I feel for these soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan because I'm sure they're coming home and noticing the same disconnect that I did when I served. Moreover, stories about their families and others who are here and trying to make a difference largely go unreported.
Ever heard of Soldiers' Angels or Operation Minnesota Nice?
Probably not.
There have been just two mentions of Operation Minnesota Nice by the Twin Cities metro dailies, one a brief in the Pioneer Press and the other a front-page story in the paper across the river. Operation Minnesota Nice collects care packages — of baby wipes, lip balm, baby powder and other items — for soldiers serving overseas. Soldiers' Angels does the same thing, mating civilians who maybe don't have a loved one overseas with soldiers who don't have loved ones.
Where's the daily coverage of these groups and others like them?
Moreover, where are the stories on nearly every VFW and American Legion hall that's actively supporting the troops? What about their stories?
Instead, we get Monday's front-page story about a "secret" memo about "emerging U.S. plans" to withdraw troops next year. Why isn't the focus of the story the fact that 14 of 18 Iraqi provinces are stable and the four that aren't are primarily home to the genocidal gang of thugs who terrorized that country for 30 years?
And reporters wonder why they're despised.
good post
Amen
The St. Paul Pioneer-Press actually hired this Yost fellow? How did he get through the Personnel Department? And how did this column get through the Editors?
And where will he be working next week...???
Mark
Great Post!
The obvious truth is that the media almost never reports good deeds in general. They thrive on negativty and conflict. When you add in their liberal bias you get what we see coming out of Iraq. People who were there saying one thing, people who were not saying something entirely different.
Yeppers. Great article, rhema.
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Is this the Mark Yost who writes (wrote?) for AP???
It was evident that the writers, of some of the articles, had not attended the same events as I.
I'll bump to that.
ping
How refreshing! Power to him, then.
It is a good post. However, I think that it just barely scratches the surface. I hate the media for all of the reasons above plus their self righteous holier than thou attitudes. They honestly believe that they are on a holy crusade to make the world a better place. They hold allegiance to none but the holy order of fellow journalists. They will investigate the he!! out of anyone, but don't dare look to closely into their lives. They scream like the filthy useless mounds of flesh that they are, blah!
I hear you about reporters looking for dirt. I had some wonderful neighbors of a different religion. They dressed in western style, were agricultural, and did not watch tv (the last part wasn't part of the religion. they just didn't watch tv). A woman in our area had killed her children in a horrible way. The media found out that this woman had met this church group (turned out she had met them ONCE during a rummage sale). So there was a reporter who confronted me when I was taking out the trash. Having dealt with them before I knew what to say and what no to say. It was obvious she had talked to other neighbors (none of them could say one bad thing about this family). Then, she looked at my house, which had a built-on addition in the back. "Is this a compound?" she asked. "No. It's my house." I should have asked if she lived in a cracker box or something.
"I met (fill in the blank) when {(s)he it} was canvasing for Hillary Rodham Clinton. She constantly spoke of her admiration for the woman.
Little off the rocker, if you ask me."
All I know is that Yost was working for the Wall Street Journal and decided to move to the midwest for family reasons, and the Press snapped him up, and now he's one of the focal points of a nice little group of Minnesota media conservatives that includes Craig Westover, Fraters Libertas, James Lileks, "Captain Ed", Power Line, The Northern Alliance Radio Network, The Taxpayer's League, and the irrepressible Vox Day.
All this in the People's Republic of Minnesota. Who'd a thunk it?
All this in the People's Republic of Minnesota. Who'd a thunk it?
But you need a conservative roster like that to make up for Garrison Keilor...
Did you know his trial is over?
Did you know he was sentenced?
Did you see/hear any of the judge's comments on TV/Radio?
Didn't think so.
Everyone should hear what the judge had to say.
Prior to sentencing, the Judge asked the defendant if he had anything to say.
Defendant's response: After admitting his guilt to the court for the record, Reid also admitted his "allegiance to Osama bin Laden, to Islam, and to the religion of Allah," and defiantly stated "I think I will not apologize for my actions," and told the court "I am at war with your country."
Judge Young then delivered the statement quoted below:
Ruling by Judge William Young, US District Court.
January 30, 2003, United States vs. Reid.
Judge Young: "Mr. Richard C. Reid, hearken now to the sentence the Court imposes upon you.
On counts 1, 5 and 6 the Court sentences you to life in prison in the custody of the United States Attorney General. On counts 2, 3, 4 and 7, the Court sentences you to 20 years in prison on each count, the sentence on each count to run consecutive with the other.
That's 80 years. On count 8 the Court sentences you to the mandatory 30 years consecutive to the 80 years just imposed. The Court imposes upon you each of the eight counts a fine of $250,000 for the aggregate fine of $2 million. The Court accepts the government's recommendation with respect to restitution and orders restitution in the amount of $298.17 to Andre Bousquet and $5,784 to American Airlines. The Court imposes upon you the $800 special assessment.
The Court imposes upon you five years supervised release simply because the law requires it. But the life sentences are real life sentences so I need go no further. This is the sentence that is provided for by our statutes. It is a fair and just sentence. It is a righteous sentence.
Let me explain this to you. We are not afraid of you or any of your terrorist co-conspirators, Mr. Reid. We are Americans. We have been through the fire before. There is all too much war talk here and I say that to everyone with the utmost respect. Here in this court, we deal with individuals as individuals and care for individuals as individuals. As human beings, we reach out for justice.
You are not an enemy combatant. You are a terrorist. You are not a soldier in any war. You are a terrorist. To give you that reference, to call you a soldier, gives you far too much stature. Whether it is the officers of government who do it or your attorney who does it, or if you think you are a soldier. You are not----- you are a terrorist. And we do not negotiate with terrorists. We do not meet with terrorists. We do not sign documents with terrorists We hunt them down one by one and bring them to justice.
So war talk is way out of line in this court. You are a big fellow. But you are not that big. You're no warrior. I've know warriors. You are a terrorist. A species of criminal that is guilty of multiple attempted murders. In a very real sense, State Trooper Santiago had it right when you first were taken off that plane and into custody and you wondered where the press and where the TV crews were, and he said: "You're no big deal."
You are no big deal.
What your able counsel and what the equally able United States attorneys have grappled with and what I have as honestly as I know how tried to grapple with, is why you did something so horrific. What was it that led you here to this courtroom today?
I have listened respectfully to what you have to say. And I ask you to search your heart and ask yourself what sort of unfathomable hate led you to do what you are guilty and admit you are guilty of doing. And I have an answer for you. It may not satisfy you, but as I search this entire record, it comes as close to understanding as I know.
It seems to me you hate the one thing that to us is most precious. You hate our freedom. Our individual freedom. Our individual freedom to live as we choose, to come and go as we choose, to believe or not believe as we individually choose. Here, in this society, the very wind carries freedom. It carries it everywhere from sea to shining sea. It is because we prize individual freedom so much that you are here in this beautiful courtroom. So that everyone can see, truly see, that justice is administered fairly, individually, and discretely. It is for freedom's sake that your lawyers are striving so vigorously on your behalf and have filed appeals, will go on in their representation of you before other judges.
We Americans are all about freedom. Because we all know that the way we treat you, Mr. Reid, is the measure of our own liberties. Make no mistake though. It is yet true that we will bare any burden; pay any price, to preserve our freedoms. Look around this courtroom. Mark it well. The world is not going to long remember what you or I say here. Day after tomorrow, it will be forgotten, but this, however, will long endure. Here in this courtroom and courtrooms all across America, the American people will gather to see that justice, individual justice, justice, not war, individual justice is in fact being done. The very President of the United States through his officers will have to come into courtrooms and lay out evidence on which specific matters can be judged and juries of citizens will gather to sit and judge that evidence democratically, to mold and shape and refine our sense of justice.
See that flag, Mr. Reid? That's the flag of the United States of America. That flag will fly there long after this is all forgotten. That flag stands for freedom. And it always will.
Mr. Custody Officer - stand him down.
So, how much of Judge Young's comments did we hear on our TV sets?
We packed him off to New York once -- but dang it, he moved back and brought friends. Now we're trying to get rid of Jessica Lange and Sam Shepherd, too.
Maybe a demotion to Kansas.
?? What sailor identifies himself as a soldier?
"?? What sailor identifies himself as a soldier?"
A member of the U.S. Navy is a soldier. Do you think the three SEALS killed in Afghanistan two weeks ago weren't soldiers? How about Scott Speicher?
Ain't it awful that those who have the least to show are those who are most inclined to show it?
I'm not trying to insult anyone. Sailors are sailors, soldiers are soldiers. I've never heard of a Navy guy refering to himself as a soldier. Perhaps it's more common than my 24 years in the service have indicated.
Knock me over with a feather, this is as big as surprize as if it was the LA Times of the Boston Globe. As a long-serving Active/Reserve/Guard combat veteran, my impression of MSM journalists is lower than whale poo in the Marianas Trench.
There are some that do their jobs. We were force-fed embeds from the LA Times and they did a good story that ran in late December, 2002, after embedding with one of our teams in a safe-ish area.
The staff hated the story because it made the team look good and the staff look bad -- it was dead on! (And I was on the staff at the time).
But a good rule of thumb with journalists is, you can't shoot 'em, but if you talk to 'em or assist 'em in any way you will live to regret it. I always start with the assumption that the journo has never served, has never known anybody that ever served, and reflexively hates the flag and the uniform, as well as the man or woman inside it. So far, this has worked well.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
Yep. At a funeral for a friend of mine the press ignored the hundred-odd Special Forces soldiers in Class A's (his old and new units), the fifty air force guys and gals in USAF dress blues (the unit of his best buddy since boyhood), or the town vets in VFW regalia (and one guy in his Army Air Corps pinks and greens).
They zoomed in on an unrequested, scruffy contingent from the "Vietnam Veterans Motorcycle Club," a scruffy outlaw biker bunch, most of whom ARE criminals but ARE NOT veterans, Vietnam or otherwise (they seemed to be in their 30s and 40s!), because the "VVMC" had the scroungy beards and shoulder length hair (last washed, or at least picked for lice, in 1993), rumpled BDUs with bogus patches, and other regalia of the Hollywood veteran.
The VVMC bunch were very much at home in front of the cameras. "They always interview us," one of them told me. You don't say.
The funeral guest-of-honour's widow, his two kids, his teammates from an Afghan tour, a couple of major generals (one of whom came because of a personal impression this soldier made on him), his first-tour air force CCT guy (playing hooky from Walter Reed where they were reassembling him), were all there, but did anybody want to talk to them? Heck, no.
Send in the bikers, the newsmen are here.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
May their tribe increase, to the disgruntlement of pontificating know-it-alls like His Prairie Home Highness.
I experienced a similarly strange circumstance at the Minnesota March for Life some years back. About 8,000 pro-lifers showed up that January 22. Across the street might have been 12-18 pro-abort counter-protestors. Some of the semi-profane ditties they were chanting never made it onto the local evening news, for some inexplicable reason. Anyway, our CBS affiliate led its interview coverage by interviewing one of the knot of counter-protestors, and then it provided as much air time to the 18 as it did the 8,000. I fired off a letter to the news director thanking him for providing Minnesota citizens with a ridiculously obvious, textbook example of media bias.
"I haven't much love for the media but really it isn't for the above reasons. Its the damned agenda they have. ' pie in the sky ' liberals who know best for us little folks."
I hate them for using their primacy in reporting the facts to promote an agenda instead of simply reporting the facts. That I hate the agenda makes it worse.
And BTW, no matter what we'd like to think about internet news countering the MSM, the internet has yet to break a big story. The stories are still primarily written by the MSM. And the MSM knows it--which is why it's writing stories like this:
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8514668/
So until we regularly see posts on FR from non-MSM sources, we're going to be stuck with their version of the facts. An American version of http://english.ohmynews.com/ needs to become a primary source here if we're to really overcome the American MSM's agenda-setting ability. Ohmynews.com basically took over reporting on the Korean government and got Roh elected there. Leftists did that to evade the old guard newspapers in Korea--we must do that here for conservatives to get a primary voice instead of a secondary one, if we want the agenda to be "government messes this up AGAIN!" instead of "why won't government do something about this?"
Because it is so easy to hate them.
They are degenerates, perverts, they are against everything that is good and decent. They worship the communists and socialists. It is not that they lie but they are incapable of telling even the most simple truth.
" And BTW, no matter what we'd like to think about internet news countering the MSM, the internet has yet to break a big story. "
Didnt Drudge break the Monica / Clinton story after Newsweek sat on the story? I thought someone at Newsweek slipped this story to him and he broke it to the world.
Well said. The media is Anti American, especially when a republican is in the White House. Wish there were some way to make them stop their lies, but I guess there isn't!
It's a mistake to say that most soldiers hate the lamestream media. The brave men and women in uniform are merely contemptous of the press. They see most reporters for what they truly are, arrogant, biased, not particularly honest airheads who think they're smarter and better than everyone else.
Isikoff did the reporting. Drudge ran the story. It's a subtle difference, and maybe my post shouldn't read "break the story" as much as it should say "gathered the facts," but my point is that the reporting, and thus the agenda-setting, is still predominantly done proactively by the MSM. Most of the news work done on the web is reactive. Even Drudge's posting of the Monica story was reacting to prior bimbo eruptions.
Until there is a proactively reporting MSM alternative, we will be stuck posting about the MSM's stories about health care and homeless moms every four years. I understood there to be one, a union of conservative bloggers reporting, but I can't even find it on the web now.
I'm a Reagan era Navy vet, '79-'88. While it seems to have become common recently for many civilians with no military background to refer to any member of the armed forces as a "soldier", I never heard any of the sailors I served with call himself anything but a sailor. Oh, we may have used the slang terms for our jobs. Sailors could be BB stackers, grapes, snipes, deck apes, bubblechasers, one-wires, nose pickers, twidgets, mess cranks, and so forth. I was a tweak. Blackshoes looked down upon Airedales, and vice versa, and to the Marines we were all "squids". A sailor calling himself a soldier would be a first for me, though.
Soldiers serve in the Army, Marines in the Marines, sailors in the Navy, and airmen in the Air Force, or so it was back when Davy Jones was in diapers, Ronaldus Magnus was staring down the Evil Empire, and I was a young AT2 aboard the USS Independence.
A SEAL's a SEAL, Speicher's a pilot and a sailor's a sailor.
Most excellent judge. Despite being a news junkie, I never heard it.
He'd probably prefer to be called a Naval aviator.
I didn't mean to instigate a semantics war; we're obviously all on the same side. My immediate family is represented in all four branches, but not myself. I am a civilian who worked for years at AFRL in Dayton, Ohio.
Ironically, I was defensive because when I posted the comment, I had just gotten back from the gym where a guy from West Point had called me a squid (without humor) b/c I had my brother's Naval Academy shirt on. He and my cousin who is a SEAL team leader are active duty and in danger. So I apologize for my ignorance.
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