Trust me, I'm no fan of the media, and I think Tillman attained American Hero status the day he exited the locker room and walked down to the recruiter's office. For that matter, the vast majority of our service members are heroes, but Tillman's stature made him more visible than most...which is precisely why they should have been far more circumspect about the manner in which his death was handled.
The Army wasted little time awarding him a Silver Star...something that should not have been done without a thorough validation of facts and circumstances.
Yah, fair enough. I'll grant that maybe they were over-eager to make him some kind of poster boy. But it's an understandable knee-jerk, in some ways. Everybody wanted to believe that. And... as cover-ups go, it sure didn't last long. But yeah, knee-jerk reactions tend to foul things up, and it did here too.