Posted on 06/28/2006 7:03:20 AM PDT by Herosmith
Simple Bush hatred? Certainly it is an element.
An East Coast, effete liberalism that considers legal governmental oversight as dangerous, and maybe more so than al Qaeda? Absolutely.
Latent, reflexive anti-Americanism? Yes.
But at root, it is a hubris that somehow, the job of the press to report information is on an equal footing with the obligation of government to protect us from our enemies.
Which brings me to a telling installment of the great PBS series, Ethics in America, as recounted by Jack Dunphy:
Nowhere was this mindset more vividly displayed than in a 1987 installment of the series Ethics in America, hosted by the late Fred Friendly, former president of CBS News. Each program in the series featured a moderator and panel of experts discussing ethical issues in business, medicine, or what have you, and the topic in one episode was ethics in the military. Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree was the moderator, and among the well-known panelists were retired General William Westmoreland and media heavyweights Peter Jennings and Mike Wallace. (Hadley Arkes wrote about the series in the June 16, 1989, issue of National Review. The series is available on video here.)
Ogletree asked the panel to imagine a war between the hypothetical countries of North and South Kosan. The United States was backing South Kosan, and indeed American troops were deployed in the field alongside South Kosanese forces. The North Kosanese offered to allow Jennings and a crew to film them behind their lines. Would Jennings go? Of course, he answered.
Then Ogletree introduced the ethical dilemma: While filming the North Kosanese, you see they are setting up an ambush for an approaching column of American and South Kosanese soldiers. What do you do? Would you stand by and film as the North Kosanese opened fire on the Americans?
Jennings pondered the question. "Well, I guess I wouldn't," he said finally. "I am going to tell you now what I am feeling, rather than the hypothesis I drew for myself. If I were with a North Kosanese unit that came upon Americans, I think that I personally would do what I could to warn the Americans." He went on to say he would warn the Americans even if it meant losing the story, even if it meant losing his life.
But this admirable display of patriotic duty was short-lived, for he was then upbraided by Mike Wallace.
"I think some other reporters would have a different reaction," Wallace said. "They would regard it simply as a story they were there to cover." Wallace was "astonished" at Jennings's answer, and he began to lecture him as he would an errant schoolchild.
"You're a reporter," Wallace scolded. "I'm a little bit at a loss to understand why, because you're an American, you would not have covered that story."
Didn't Jennings have a higher duty, Ogletree asked Wallace, than to roll film as American soldiers were being shot? "No," Wallace said. "You don't have a higher duty. No. No. You're a reporter!"
Properly chastened, Jennings backed down. "I chickened out," he said. He had lost sight of his journalistic duty to remain detached from the story.
After more interplay between the newsmen (the sage and the cub), Ogletree turned to another panelist, George M. Connell, a Marine Corps colonel in full uniform.
Connell looked at Wallace and Jennings as he might a pair of stains on his dress blues. "I have utter contempt," he said. "Two days later they're both walking off my hilltop, two hundred yards away and they get ambushed. And they're lying there wounded. And they're going to expect I'm going to send Marines up there to get them. They're just journalists. They're not Americans."
"Oh, we'll do it," Connell continued, "and that's what makes me so contemptuous of them. Marines will die going to get a couple of journalists."
There was complete silence all around. Even Ogletree was at a loss. Finally Newt Gingrich, then a junior congressman, summed it up perfectly. "The military," he said, "has done a vastly better job of systematically thinking through the ethics of behavior in a violent environment than the journalists have."
"You don't have a higher duty. No. No. You're a reporter!"
They actually believe this shit. Life is just another episode of Lou Grant.
This is as clear a statement of religious fervor as any. Duty to country? To humanity? To one's own conscience? Does this duty include the duty to create a story one believes should be reported?
Then again, where was that sense of duty in any of the serial Democrat scandals we've been treated to? Where, for example, is the serious journalistic investigation into what Hillary did with the FBI files? Into the circumstances of Vince Foster's death? Ron Brown's? Webb Hubbell's? etc.?
You are right. The Left quietly cheers as our soldiers are killed in Iraq.
Hmmm...sounds like something Ann Coulter would say.
Mike Wallace is a bad father, too.
Nicely put.
They are not anything-libertarians, they are pureblood Stalinists, nothing more.
Sherman and the reporter
Despite the recent successes of embedding, relations between the military and the press sometimes are contentious. Yet even the greatest animosities of our current era seldom reach the depth of the hatred that existed between General William Tecumseh Sherman and the newspapermen who followed his army. Enraged by newspaper listings of the Union order of battle prior to engagements, Sherman banished reporters from his lines and referred to them as "dirty newspaper scribblers who have the impudence of Satan." A reporter for the New York Tribune wrote that being "a cat in hell without claws is nothing to [being] a reporter in General Sherman's army." His brethren were not so kind; they circulated reports of Sherman's alleged insanity.
The tension reached a head when a reporter for the New York Herald, Thomas Knox, defied Sherman's orders and forwarded an account of the Union defeat at Chickasaw Bluffs. Sherman had Knox arrested and bound over for court-martial. The reporter responded, "Of course, General Sherman, I have no feelings against you personally, but you are regarded as the enemy of our set and we must in self-defense write you down." The court found Knox guilty and ordered him banished from the theater. As the Herald was a strong supporter of Lincoln, the President countermanded the sentence on the condition that Sherman's superior, U. S. Grant, agreed. Grant would do no such thing, and Knox was forced to appeal to the man he defamed. Sherman's reply:
Come with a sword or musket in your hand, prepared to share with
us our fate ... and I will welcome you as a brother; but come as
you now do expecting me to ally the reputation and honor of my
country and my fellow-soldiers with you as the representative of
the Press which you yourself say makes so slight a difference
between truth and falsehood and my answer is Never!
Knox left the theater.
Source: Joseph H. Ewing. "The New Sherman Letters." American Heritage, July-August 1987.
COPYRIGHT 2004 U.S. Army War College
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group
Pinch Sulzberger's infatuation with "transgressivity".
Whether he is actually sexually stimulated by transgressivity, or merely has an adolescent fascination with it, his paper has become more and more in thrall to artistic, moral, sexual, and now political behavior which is over the edge.
What's at the heart? It's the mess inside Pinch's head.
THANKS for reference
nail their treasonous asses and hang 'em 'till their bowels evacuate bump!
"So many folks are calling the Times to cancel their subscriptions..."That's good news.I heard that on Fox last night.Maybe NYC isn't as far gone as i thought?
I think so too. Nevertheless they have it coming and the President should do what's right. Meanwhile Congress could haul them to hearings, no?
If a republican or a conservative makes one mistake, it is breaking news on the front page for months.
If a liberal democrat makes 99 mistakes, it might get reported ( buried ) in the middle somewhere once.
Yes, he's a bad father, I think he didn't see his son very often after the divorce.
Apparently, he neither tried to see nor write a letter to his son for decades ?
He could have sent a postcard once or twice .../s
Sad, but the other crap that Wallace has done has been devasting to the entire world!!!
You know, my post-humous respect for Peetah went up a notch. Then I read the next paragraph. Did anyone tell Mike Wallace that Peetah is Canadian?
You are correct.
Wallace and friends have been terrible to and for the world.
His his private life, Wallace is a jerk, too.
Wallace has a LOT to answer for.
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