"Military-haters in the press" from The American Thinker

The American Thinker has it: "Military-haters in the press" and it's worth reading:

The last few years have seen a heightened awareness of the mainstream media's anti-military bias. Plenty of people are noticing it, and even some media brand name correspondents are admitting it. There is plenty of evidence.

The New York Times has run front-page articles regarding the defense forces’ putative reliance on unemployable people opting to become cannon fodder by "volunteering" for the military, to get a paycheck because other employers would not hire them. CBS News has run similar pieces. Neither considered anything so mundane as serving one’s nation or fulfilling family tradition as a possible motivation for enlistment.

The overblown Abu Ghraib coverage, which enflamed the Muslim world, was the product of an editorial inclination to believe the very worst about our military, and to force responsibility up the chain of command, to the very top -a principle the press never applies to its own top management. Few in the press noted that the military justice system was already pursuing the miscreants at the very time the press obtained photos.

The alleged ransacking of an Iraqi weapons cache by insurgents while it was under Army guard did not happen, and the reports were refuted by the blogosphere, not by the vaunted fact-checking editorial function of the mainstream media, supposedly its key advantage over internet bloggers...

Update: And the effect - read this from Chrenkoff. The steady drumbeat of negativism takes a toll... as this email proves:

Even my family back home is starting to think it's a Vietnam-style "quagmire". Al-Qaeda couldn't get better PR service if they paid for it, and the media are providing gladly and free-of-charge!

If this is how liberals support the troops, then could they please f*cking STOP already? Don't tell those of us in the military you "support the troops", and then spend 110% of your time and print space breaking your necks to paint us all as bloodthirsty criminals because of the acts of a few – all as a thinly-disguised way to grind a political axe with a President with which 90% of the media has a deeply personal beef. It isn't fooling anybody – especially "the troops".

Exactly. But while the military recovered from Vietnam, the media seems not to have...

Update2: Since I am not sure where else to put this, I'll add it on here- David Brooks's take on "bashing Newsweek" while the real enemy seems forgotten:

Many of my friends on the right have decided that the Newsweek episode exposes the rotten core of the liberal media. Dennis Prager, who is intelligent 99 percent of the time, writes, "Newsweek is directly responsible for the deaths of innocents and for damaging America." Countless conservatives say the folks at Newsweek were quick to believe the atrocity tales because they share the left-wing, post-Vietnam mentality. On his influential blog, Austin Bay writes that the coastal media "presume the worst about the U.S. military - always make that presumption."

Excuse me, guys, but this is craziness. I used to write for Newsweek. I know Mike Isikoff and the editors. And I know about liberals in the media. The people who run Newsweek are not a bunch of Noam Chomskys with laptops. Not even close. Whatever might have been the cause of their mistakes, liberalism had nothing to do with it.

Meanwhile, the left side of the blogosphere has erupted with fury over the possibility that American interrogators might not have flushed a Koran down the toilet. The Nation and leftish Web sites are in a frenzy to prove that the story is probably true even if Newsweek is retracting it.

This, too, is unhinged. Would it be illegal for more people on the left to actually be happy that a story slurring Americans may turn out to be unproven? Could there be a few more liberals willing to admit that prisoners routinely lie about their treatment? (Do we expect them to say their time in captivity wasn't so bad?)

Then I click my mouse over to the transcripts of administration statements and I can't believe what I'm seeing. We're in the middle of an ideological war against people who want to destroy us, and what have the most powerful people on earth become? Whining media bashers. They're attacking Newsweek while bending over backward to show sensitivity to the Afghans who just went on a murderous rampage.

Talk about the bigotry of low expectations.

Reminds of those old Bob Dylan lyrics, "You're right from your side, I'm right from mine - we're both just one too many mornings an' thousand miles behnd." Have a nice day.