The MSM isn’t screwing soldiers, but future subscribers
Media Slander - Dateline: June 11, 2005 1:47 PM - Author: Kevin
A buddy of mine passed me an e-mail from a soldier in our company who volunteered to go to Iraq for a year to train and fight with Iraqi defense forces. He just got to Baghdad and his team is already kicking some ass:
I got to my team at about 6:30pm and by 9:30pm, I was on my first mission with the Iraqi Police. It was very productive. The Iraqis bagged 13 insurgent/Anti-Iraqi Forces(AIF) personnel. It is amazing because they are highly motivated and really do want a free, democratic Iraq. In spite of what the media may lead you to believe, there is a lot of good going on here.
The dig on the media is military boilerplate -- we say stuff like this all the time because we're sick of the MSM body count and sympathy with the terrorists. But it got me thinking, especially given recent talk about sagging network viewership and the 5 percent average drop in newspaper circulation 2 that publishers called "Black Monday":
If the MSM thinks numbers are bad now, just wait until they try selling newspaper subscriptions to War on Terror veterans. Read more:
The 18 to 35 age bracket is prime media grazing ground -- a business has to replace customers who die off, and snaring this demographic is paramount. As we have seen here covering the circulation sag, this group is not taking well to newspapers, and to a lesser extent, MSM network news. This has been blamed on a more Internet-savvy generation, the Do Not Call List 3 and other media fluffery, not a media embroiled in bias 4, plagiarism and fabulism 5 scandals.
So let's look at some military numbers. The U.S. military this fiscal year 6 has 1.4 million active-duty troops and another 860,000 in the National Guard and reserves. Just under 200,000 of these troops 7 are in War on Terror nations at any given time, but keep in mind that units continually cycle through.
This is a wild guess on my part, but we could easily have close to a million veterans of the war now, and this number will increase as this war continues. And again, I can't read minds, but how many of these people are sick and tired of the media coverage of the war? From my experience as a soldier, it's a lot. The military hated the press long before Sept. 11, and aside from a few embeds working for smaller newspapers and TV stations who know who the good guys are, the media's general antics in this fight sure don't merit respect.
So in short, we are going to have millions of veterans who are sooner or later going to leave the military, or stay in and settle down while living on post. And of course, it is inevitable that someone will try to sell them a newspaper subscription.
I imagine a typical exchange will be a soldier politely or impolitely telling a newspaper marketer in a supermarket to go pound sand -- newspaper marketers have shifted to supermarkets and big-box stores since the Do Not Call List came into effect.
What these days would compel a veteran of the war to pay for information from the MSM? Look how flat-footed it was caught when Iraqi election day came around and millions of Iraqis braved threats to line up and vote. The media bought their own steady diet of quagmire, Abu Ghraib and insurgency -- their lack of desire to leave Baghdad's green zone left them out-of-touch with the nation's pulse.
After a year in Iraq of rounding up bad guys, destroying Saddam's weapons caches and rebuilding Iraq, why would a veteran want to pay for information from the MSM? Those stories don't make the news, except for the aforementioned smaller newspapers and TV stations following their home units. Drop a Koran in Gitmo 8 and you're on the front page for two weeks 9, but pass out thousands of them in Iraq to needy worshipers and the press won't give you the time of day, unless of course you happen to accidentally drop one.
The reason that milblogs 10 have 11 such 12 a huge 13 following 14 in the military is because they offer up the success stories that most of the MSM won't touch with a 10-foot microphone boom. So why should a woefully-underpaid soldier pay for an MSM subscription when he or she gets the other side of the story for free?
After coming home with a chest full of ribbons and a Good Conduct Medal for living military values and ethics, why would you give money to MSM big-wigs who accuse you 15 of war crimes without proof 16?
I've heard this a thousand times from soldiers of many races, creeds and colors. If I had a dollar for every time a grunt asked me if the media "covered the same war that I fought," I'd be a rich man. Simply put, soldiers think more than the rest of the populace that the press selectively covers stories, and with that mindset, I doubt they will ever be convinced to pay for the privilege of reading them. And I think it's safe to say that soldiers' families aren't going to be inclined to subsidize slander libel of their loved ones via a newspaper subscription (oops -- slander is spoken, libel is written).
While the military's goal is a democratic Iraq, the MSM is laboring for a Democratic (as in party) America through ignoring military triumphs, trumpeting failures, exaggerating the minor and making it up when they can get away with it.
So this newspaper reporter wishes the MSM good luck in shoring up sagging circulations -- with millions of veterans who hold us in utter contempt entering the civilian workforce, we're going to need it. Chickens have an uncanny historical tendency to come home to roost.
And confidential to my brothers who volunteered for Iraq for another year just as the rest of us are getting ready to demobilize, God bless, kick ass and get home in one piece."
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