From the beginning of the War on Terror, the mainstream media has been working to bring home the bad news on the war, virtually to the exclusion of any good news., Even if they've had to fabricate it on occasion.
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For the better part of five years, we've listened to the steady drumbeat of bad news on Iraq. Today, with the progress of the surge, there's some truly good news to report and yet there's a virtual blackout on it. In our upside-down culture, it seems that failure has a hundred fathers but success is an orphan, and we're paying an enormous price. Already the overwhelmingly negative articles about the military and the war have had a profoundly depressing effect on our society's ability to raise an army. The more difficult it becomes to raise an army, the more difficult it will be to protect ourselves and the less successful our military can be. It's a kind of negative feedback loop created by the media and the popular culture.
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On the front page of the January 26th Wall Street Journal appeared: "The Waiting -- Just Four U.S. Soldiers are Missing in Iraq. For Their Parents, it's a Lonely Vigil." This is a depressing and heart-rending story about the lives of those families whose solider sons are missing in Iraq. It's a subject especially disturbing to military families.
In a time of war, this could be a good story to run if it were written to, let's say, provide a little balance to what otherwise might be an overwhelming supply of gung-ho-support-the-troops kind of stories. You know, a little sobering counterpoint to a plethora of overly flattering articles about the troops and the war. But do you think that's what's going on here? Of course not. There is no balance because there are virtually no favorable stories being written about the troops. From the MSM to Hollywood the media have an overwhelmingly negative view of our troops and they make that clear to us every day as they portray them as stupid, pathetic, often victims, often murderers, or against the war. And boy do they ever love stories about the infinitesimally small number who have turned against the war.
The contempt that I have for the MSM knows few bounds.
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