[Dean's World] Dave Price: Media Popularizes Stories Of Soldiers As Thugs, Ignores Heroes

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Posted by Dave Price:
Media Popularizes Stories Of Soldiers As Thugs, Ignores Heroes
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1191520920.shtml


   Robert Kaplan [1]notes the incredible disinterest in heroic soldiers,
   relative to those who are misbehaving:

     The first Medal of Honor in the global war on terror was awarded
     posthumously to Army Sgt. First Class Paul Ray Smith of Tampa,
     Fla., who was killed under withering gunfire protecting his wounded
     comrades outside Baghdad airport in April 2003.
     According to LexisNexis, by June 2005, two months after his
     posthumous award, his stirring story had drawn only 90 media
     mentions, compared with 4,677 for the supposed Quran abuse at
     Guantanamo Bay, and 5,159 for the court-martialed Abu Ghraib guard
     Lynndie England.

   This is why so many of us have grown to loathe the media -- with one
   glaring exception:

     In particular, there is Fox News's occasional series on war heroes,
     whose apparent strangeness is a manifestation of the distance the
     media has traveled away from the nation-state in the intervening
     decades. Fox's war coverage is less right-wing than it is simply
     old-fashioned, antediluvian almost. Fox's commercial success may be
     less a factor of its ideological base than of something more
     primal: a yearning among a large segment of the public for a real
     national media once again--as opposed to an international one.
     Nationalism means patriotism, and patriotism requires heroes, not
     victims.

   You know, Fox News, that awful channel the Democrats are boycotting.

References

   1. http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110010686