It has been a source of continuing wonder for me that the 4th Estate, charged with the responsibility for keeping tabs on the power-brokers, the politicians and the government in general, have so utterly failed in that responsibility--mostly entirely due to their personal ideologies. 

 

Secondly, it's a puzzlement that so many "journalists" are so leftist in outlook and are so prone to allowing their political outlooks to color whether, what and how they cover a story.  I was taught in school (admittedly, long before the left took such a firm hold of our educational systems) that the job of a true journalist was to discover the facts and report them to the public so that the public could remain well-informed and make their political, economic and social decisions based on the truth. 

 

The truth is NOT relative.  An event occurs in only one way.  There are NOT "interpretations" of what happened in any situation--only the facts.   Journalists are SUPPOSED to give us the facts and let us make our own decisions based on the facts, but the "profession" has degenerated into propagandists instead of reporters.  Propaganda is not a pejorative term and serves a useful purpose from time to time.  For example, journalists used to recognize that the nation's best interests aren't served during wartime by publishing information about troop deployments or casualty figures.  Since Vietnam, however, such data is routinely put into the public domain; intentionally, in my opinion, for the purpose of undermining public confidence in the rightness of the cause being defended.  In the case of Vietnam, it was to prevent communist control from extending into Asia's rice bowl which would tend to be of inestimable benefit to China and the USSR in their stated goal of world domination by socialism.  The socialists in the press, however, did what they could to aid and abet the communists at our expense and at the expense of the innocent Vietnamese people, who wanted nothing less than to be left alone to pursue the feeding and clothing of their families. 

 

To accomplish their goals, the press turned their duties upside down and actually lied (both directly and by omission) about what was happening there in order to turn public opinion against the war and against our own government.  They pictured the U.S. and South Vietnamese as the "aggressors" in the war because we were taking the fight into the countryside where the Viet Cong and their NVA supporters were hiding and bombing their supply lines along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

 

Admittedly, the Johnson administration's conduct of the war was abysmal--by almost any standard.  Johnson and McNamara tried to conduct the war from Washington D.C. instead of leaving it up to the commanders on the ground.  At one point, they were even choosing targets for air strikes in the north based on intel that was at least 24-hours old and refusing to allow pilots to seek out and destroy targets of opportunity.  We were constrained further by the Pentagon by not being able to return fire in some circumstances if doing so would mean that we were firing into Cambodia or Laos where the fire was originating from!  Utterly insane.  Helicopter gunships were required to take along a South Vietnames officer so that if troops were spotted on the ground, only HE could decide whether or not they were enemy troops and could be engaged...even if the troops were dressed in NVA uniforms, carrying NVA weaponry and transporting their arms and ammunition on bicycles or in two-wheel carts...a common practice by the North Vietnamese "People's" Army.  If he refused to certify them as enemy troops (which happened frequently) they had to be left alone.

 

However, the press were the real villians in the debacle that became Vietnam.  Two incidents that I personally witnessed made this abundantly clear.  The first occurred in 1965.  I'd just come in from the field and was at the Rainbow Bar in Saigon--a frequent hang-out of the foreign press.  A guy in jungle fatigues (I hadnt' been issued any yet at that time) with a UPI patch on the sleeve was on the stool next to me.  I'd been in a village in Qui Nhon Provice earlier that month just after the VC had come through on one of their "recruitment" visits.  The village mayor advised his young men NOT to go with the VC, for which he was tied to a stake and forced to watch while the VC beat his elderly wife to death with a steel, mosquito-net pole, raped and disemboweled his 30-something daughter, executed his son-in-law when he protested and then, using their bayonets, played "catch" with his 6-month-old grandson just before shooting the mayor in the head.  When I related this story to the guy from UPI, I asked him why none of that ever seemed to reach the American people.  His reply was astonishing.  "Oh, that sort of stuff happens all the time over here.  It's only 'news' if it's something rare or unusual."

 

The second incident involved a famous photograph bearing the caption "Tiger Pit."  It was taken at a S. Vietnames-run POW camp on an island off the coast of Vietnam.  The cells at this camp were iron bars on five sides of an 8' x 8' cube, the bottoms of which were set in the concrete floor, each with a hinged door.  The cells were built in rows inside what were called "tropical hooches"--buildings with latticed sides covered in screenwire to allow air circulation and tin roofs.  Necessarily, they included a crawl space between the roof and the top bars of the cells.  The photographer crawled into that crawl space and shot his photo of a VC prisoner looing up at him over his right shoulder.  The photograph raced around the world with the "Tiger Pit" caption...leaving the impression that our allies were keeping prisoners in holes in the ground covered by a barred trap door.  Because of the dim lighting, it was difficult to see the truth of the photo.  I had actually been to that POW compound in 1967 so knew the truth of the matter.  Again, this was done to leave the exact wrong impression on the public furthering cries for the end of the war and about how "corrupt" and "cruel" our alies in the South really were.  And it was all a bald-faced lie.

 

The press has been doing the same thing throughout the war in Iraq.  It began even before Bush's decision to resume hostilities that were, in fact, merely suspended in 1991 with the "unconditional surrender" of the Iraqi army conditioned on THEIR abandoning their WMDs, not conduct ANY internal raids against the Kurds or the Southern Shia, not fly their warplanes or ANY aircraft within established "no-fly" zones and not target or fire SAMs at UN aircraft on patrol within the no-fly zones, and fully cooperate with UN teams in locating and destroying WMDs and the means of producing theml.  Iraq violated every, single one of those conditions for several years and the response from the Clinton administration was to shoot a few Tomahawks into Bagdhad and permit pilots to take out SAM sites and the radars targeting them.  Other than that, the Clinton administration did little or nothing--especially when Hussein decided to stop cooperating with the WMD teams and effectively kicked them out of the country.  The UN, for its part, issued 17 "resolutions" calling on Iraq to live up to the terms of the cease-fire...which Iraq simply ignored.

 

Every intelligence agency on the planet believed that Iraq had hidden WMDs in defiance of the U.S. and UN decrees and the terms of the cease-fire.  We also know that Iraq had been a supporter of terrorists, actually paying the equivalent of $25K to the families of every suicide bomber who managed to murder Israelis while killing him or herself, and this continued until the 2003 resumption of the war.  We know that Hussein had given shelter to other well-known terrorists in Bagdhad and we know that several of his own "scientists" who managed to defect told us that he had NOT stopped his search for WMDs including a nuclear capability.  We know that he rented out Salmon Pak as a locale where terrorists could practice taking over airliners for hijackings.

 

Yet, when large caches of WMDs were not found after the resumption of the war in 2003, the press jumped on that as "proof" that Bush had lied about them in order to talk Congress and the American people into supporting his decision to go back into Iraq and put a stop to Hussein and his vicious dictatorship as part of the war that had been declared on terrorism and terrorists.  The press completely ignored the fact that every other intel agency in the world--including the Russians, the Jordanians and the Egyptians--Iraq's near neighbors--were saying the exact same thing.  The point is, it may have been a mistake to believe that Iraq had hidden stockpiles of WMDs (it's STILL not certain that they didn't exist when the decisions were being made and were destroyed or spirited out of the country just prior to the re-invasion by the U.S. and British) but for the press to insist that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfield and Powell had all LIED about it was (and remains) simply a symptom of Bush Derangement Syndrome without any relationship to the real truth.

 

Even the recent revelation that Iraq had 500 TONS of yellowcake uranium,which has now been shipped to Canada, has been pooh-poohed as irrelevant as proof of Hussein's ongoing nuclear ambitions. 

 

As progress has been made in pacifying most of Iraq, the press has essentially ignored it, but some bugwit throwing his shoes at President Bush has gotten weeks of play.  The simple truth is that the press, instead of reporting the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, has systematically told lies, half-truths and rumors and tried to pass them off as "news."   And, they've done this intentionally in an effort to try and to turn public opinion against the war and against an administration that the left has been angry at ever since Bush defeated Gore in 2000.  To a great degree, their efforts have been successful as witness Bush's historically low "approval ratings."  I'm a bit skeptical of them in any case because it's the same left-leaning press that TELLS us what his approval ratings are and I find it VERY hard to believe that 70% of Americans thought Clinton had done a good job as President when he left office in 2001.

 

I won't go into the recent Presidential elections here, but the whole campaign is rife with examples of obvious favoritist treatment of Obama.  When most Obama voters don't even know who Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dorhn, Father Flager, Jeremiah Wright or Tony Rezko even ARE, the press simply hasn't done its job in informing the public.