General Sanchez spent the first half of his remarks blasting the biased and agenda-driven press coverage of Iraq, and most of the second half blasting the debilitating partisan struggles in Washington. Eg,
The basic ethics of a journalist that calls for:
1. Seeking truth,
2. Providing fair and comprehensive account of events and issues
3. Thoroughness and honesty
All are victims of the massive agenda driven competition for economic or political supremacy. The death knell of your ethics has been enabled by your parent organizations who have chosen to align themselves with political agendas. What is clear to me is that you are perpetuating the corrosive partisan politics that is destroying our country and killing our servicemembers who are at war.
My assessment is that your profession, to some extent, has strayed from these ethical standards and allowed external agendas to manipulate what the american public sees on tv, what they read in our newspapers and what they see on the web. For some of you, just like some of our politicians, the truth is of little to no value if it does not fit your own preconceived notions, biases and agendas.
http://www.militaryreporters.org/sanchez_101207.html
With one accord, the entire press corps said, "Okay, we didn't hear any of that" and picked out the 'nightmare' line, which is fitted to their Iraq template. Thus proving the accuracy of General Sanchez's remarks regarding their coverage.
You know, Sea Otter, the left might gain more traction with their political arguments if they tried to stick to points that were actually true. Rush Limbaugh has said a lot of things that you could fault, but calling all military opponents of the war "phony soldiers" was not one of them. Rush was talking about Jesse Macbeth, a real "phony soldier."
The most disturbing thing to me is that the Left no longer seems to even care if what they say is true or not true. "Fake but accurate" seems to be the new standard of the day. It's just like the TANG memos, which were phony as three dollar bills, any college kid would have seen through them, but they said what Mary Mapes and Dan Rather wanted to hear, so they aired them.
Or take the Swift Boat Vets - 250 real Navy veterans, who had names and faces and careers spent at other activities than politics, and who included 3/4 of the officers in Kerry's own Navy division. But the Dems needed them discredited, so they were dutifully painted as political dirty tricksters in the pay of Karl Rove. The scant evidence to support this idea (they got political contributions from known Republicans, gasp!) was blown all over the front pages, while the much more substantial evidence discrediting Sen Kerry's accounts of himself (he was not in Cambodia in Dec 1968, he never released his records despite repeated promises to do, etc) were spiked in the MSM. But who cares, they have succeeded in making "Swiftboating" a new synonym for dirty tricks. |
