"Don't Question My Patriotism!"...

A defensive protest often heard these days from the MSM. But Dean Esmay has a convincing post as to why we should.

The truth is that it's screamingly obvious to tens of millions of Americans, not to mention most members of the military, that the press is not on our side in the current conflict. They simply aren't: they see their duty as being to something "higher" than that. Of course, they have no truly objective standards except "be skeptical of everyone and everything." In practice, this leaves them free to interpret their own prejudices and biases as "objectivity"--and it shows.

I've even noticed that some in the press even go further than Franken, and act as if criticizing the press is itself unpatriotic and dangerous. But that begs the question: if we're going to be equally skeptical of everything and everyone--if we're going to treat our democratically elected leaders, our military who is sworn to protect us, and psychopaths, dictators, and organized crime figures all with equal skepticism--should we not be every bit as skeptical of the press?

You want to know what a decent and patriotic press corps would look like to a lot of us? All you have to do is go back to old newspaper archives published in the 1940s or 1950s, during World War II or the Korean conflict. While these newspapers published bad news every day--casualty lists, lists of the midding and dead, ships sunk, battles that went poorly, etc.--they did not pretend to be "equally skeptical" of Hitler and Roosevelt, of MacArthur and Yamamoto. When we had a victory it was as clear that they were as elated as the man in the street. Good news was trumpeted in big headlines on the front page.

In other words, the news - good or bad - needs to be reported but when a journalist goes out of their way to present the news in a way that undermines our efforts and the lives of our servicemen - their motives are not above our skepticism or criticism.

Posted by: Gary at 06:50 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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