Yea, our media sucks ass....Just as in Vietnam, thy pushed their own agenda and made our Soldiers look like shit.
I use to pray to see a live bullet round go splashing through their heads, teach the leeches a lesson.

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Anyone who thinks freedom comes cheap, please put the blindfold on and stand against the wall.

IT IS TIME for Americans to take back the country and start a new government.

Its not the role of the media to be supportive of the troops.

The role of the media is to be a watchdog on the government.

Sadly in the run-up to and the invasion of Iraq, the media was the government's puppet. Ultimately THAT hurt the troops far more than any lack of coverage. The media should have been all over bush's ass and the congress's ass for invading a country on false pretenses.

Just exactly what would have been different in Afghanistan with different news coverage at home.
You'd have the same generals leading the same men calling in airstrikes on the same civilians, is the Taliban growing in strength because we didn't have a feature story on a children's clinic in Kabul?

The military is not the proper tool for what needs to be done in that region.
And while you may be able to drive a nail using a screwdriver, it will take you a very long time, and people may get impatient about how long the job is taking. Use the wrong tool and you get a bad result, and when you get a bad result it's natural to try to blame someone.

But it's a stretch to blame the media, because when you do you skip over the military that actually screwed up the mission, and the president that lead that screw up.
What exactly could the media have done differently that would have changed the outcome?

Well, I have a beef with the media, I think they should have been much more critical in the beginning of the conflict.

Knight Ridder ran stories that said their Pentagon sources told them that there was no evidence of WMDs in Iraq, that there was no evidence of any link between 9/11 and Iraq, but they were alone.

The media should have demanded to know what exactly was the goal in Afghanistan and how and when it would be accomplished, instead they went along and printed White House Press releases as news.

If we were going after Bin Laden, why didn't we actually go after him, why did we leave it up to people who had been his allies a few months earlier that we had bought off with SUVs and brief cases full of cash?
What made the military think that a conventional type approach would work in a country where a conventional type approach by the Soviets had failed just a little more than a decade earlier?

These would have been great questions for the media to explore, but they failed, because they were trying to "support the troops".

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“ The subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state.”

Adam Smith , The Wealth of Nations 1776

"We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics"
FDR's second Inaugural Address

Good news, in general, does not get covered. It's the unfortunate nature of human nature. Apparently we like our news to involve tragedy, crime, celebrity, and controversy.



I missed the sea change there. There may be some coverage of humanitarian missions, but I don't think your happening to catch one designates a wholesale change.

It doesn't surprise me that the coverage has waned and it's focus possibly shifted a bit. People got tired of hearing about Iraq and Afghanistan about 3 years ago. I don't think it has a lot to do with politics..... I think it has more to do with the fact that suicide bombings, sectarian strife, and firefights are less frequent so that humanitarian efforts are less overshadowed.

To me, that indicates the progress of our mission in Iraq.....not something that's worse than rape.

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The world could use more Stan Ovshinsky's

The fact that you can actually compare news coverage to rape says all kinds of things about you. Have you ever been raped? I suspect not. When you have then come back and tell me again how much worse this is than being raped.

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I guess we can assume that YOU have been both raped AND betrayed and can tell us all about both!

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As I have said several times on this forum: my father was a child molester so yes I have been raped and betrayed. Would you like to hear about how my father snuck into my room when I was eight years old, held me down, and raped me? I have plenty of stories. How about the six weeks I was left in a closet?

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And as I have said on this forum before, you put out too much personal information. Boundaries, my fiend, boundaries!

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You asked, he answered and exposed your rhetoric as the simple, nonsensical fluff that it is.

Seems like you're having a problem seeing that house of cards fall in.

Pity.

I don't really think that reporting on humanitarian missions is 'good news' per se. I think it is just imformation - inforamtion that Americans have needed to hear long before now, and information that our fighting men and women have needed us to hear long before now as evidenced by my friend's heartbreak over the kind of coverage they got during the Bush administration.

The media has sold our fighting men and women down the river time and again in the last 50 years. Fortunately, the population in general did not allow itself to be manipulated the way it was during Viet Nam, when the media simply shit on our troops.

Many of those VN vets simply do not WANT this war...."We fought, so why should our babies have to fight too?' Of course I have heard WWII vets say the same thing. But I have also known WWII vets who condemned the VN vets because they didn't 'win' the war. The older I get, the more I learn about Asia and the ME, the more I believe it is not possible to 'win' a war with that side of the world. Still, our media should not fuck over our fighting men and women the way they have for 50 years.

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Didn't even bother with those links I posted. I see you still can't read. Pity.

I will remind you that you don't know what I do, nor what experiences I have had, so you are again completely inappropriate. As per usual.

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Absolutely, I did. Here: What's worse than rape?

Again: they do not prove or support your contention. That you are either unaware of this or afraid of this is not at all surprising to me.I'm not addressing what you've gone through: I don't particularly give a damn about and, given your arguments so far, you aren't a credible source. What I was addressing was his utter dismantling of your ridiculous points, in the exact terms you requested, and then you dismissing it because it so transparently makes you look so foolish.

How do you know it was under false pretenses? Are you privy to classified information? Additionally, how would the media have known? They have now clue or training on what the information the intel showed them.

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A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
- George Bernard Shaw

We don't call in air strikes on civilians. We call in air strikes on legit Taliban/insurgents that happen to have civilians sitting right next to them. Do you think no civilians died in Germany, when we went to war against them? You don't see them bitching about it. We dropped nukes on Japan and they seemed to have gotten over it as well. You gonna speak out against WWII as well?

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A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
- George Bernard Shaw

Wow, I respect your resilience. We usually don't see eye-to-eye but I always enjoy your contributions as well thought out and fair. No crazy anger rants or w/e I would expect to see as a side effect from trauma like that.

I guess you could be crazy, irl, but you are very sane on here.

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A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
- George Bernard Shaw