America the “Bully”ful

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In My Opinion by Trevor Bothwell

Media bias is a touchy subject for a lot of newspaper companies and television networks nowadays. This is somewhat due to the fact that polls have shown that around 90% of those who work in mainstream media vote Democrat; but mostly it’s because conservative cable news forums, radio shows, and hard-hitting political websites just love to point it out on a regular basis.

Overall, the media has done a fine job covering the war in Iraq. There is certainly both good and bad coverage, but there has definitely been an increase in balanced reporting over the last few years with the advent of outlets committed to doing exactly that.

But one cannot help but wonder how impartial individual accounts of events will really be when, it would seem, a vast majority of journalists are against the war to begin with. Karl Zinsmeister, editor-in-chief of The American Enterprise who is traveling with the 82nd Airborne, said recently that he has “not met a single journalist [in Kuwait] who supports this intervention by our commander-in-chief.” This, you might argue, is bias in and of itself. Sure. But only if he’s lying.

A local Baltimore television station took their shots against the war in its first week by profiling the family of Baltimore native Marine Staff Sgt. Kendall Damon Waters-Bey, who was one of four U.S. Marines who fell tragically when their CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter crashed near the Iraqi-Kuwait border early on in the war.

Obviously distraught, the Waters-Bey family asked why their loved one had to die in a war that lacks an international mandate. The station didn’t have to diminish Staff Sgt. Waters-Bey’s sacrifice by implying that he died fighting for an unjust cause.

Last week Washington Post Foreign Service correspondent Peter Baker wrote a heartfelt account of Mohammed, the brave Iraqi lawyer who risked his life to help rescue Pfc. Jessica Lynch from the hospital where Saddam Hussein’s Fedayeen soldiers held her captive.

“Mohammed was taking a chance” in even approaching the Marine checkpoint outside Nasiriyah, Baker writes, as “Saddam's Fedayeen and their allies had been dressing in civilian clothes to get close to U.S. troops, sometimes even faking surrender, only to open fire at short range.”

Very true. But here’s the last sentence of Baker’s paragraph describing Mohammed’s courage: “U.S. troops have also fired on civilians at checkpoints.” Who is Baker kidding here?

It is true that GIs have fired at civilians. But would it be too much for him to mention that our soldiers have been forced to do so when this has occurred? Apparently, U.S. troops are the assassins, not the Iraqi soldiers that have forced at gunpoint the innocent in their population to storm checkpoints in cars and on foot, at times armed as suicide bombers.

The media don’t usually need special reasons to condemn the U.S. military, but when journalists get killed, antiwar bias is sure to increase. Two international reporters were killed this week in central Baghdad when U.S. forces fired on the Palestine Hotel. Taras Protsyuk, from the Reuters news agency, was killed and several other Reuters reporters were injured in the exchange.

Regrettably, these casualties were sustained when coalition troops returned what they said was sniper fire. But this didn’t stop Reuters’ editor-in-chief Geert Linnebank from sniffing, “[This] incident nonetheless raises questions about the judgment of the advancing U.S. troops who have known all along that this hotel is the main base for almost all foreign journalists in Baghdad."

This coming from the editor-in-chief of the same news unit that declared last March that “[h]uman rights around the world have been a casualty of the U.S. ‘war on terror’ since September 11.” Sure, and our 3000 civilians who died that day weren’t victims of human rights abuses.

I may doubt the journalistic integrity of some reporters to remark fairly on the news, but I don’t question the bravery of those who put themselves into the middle of a war as part of a career. That being said, it is absurd, and potentially suicidal, to expect tanks or planes entering into gunfire to refrain from responding when they see their enemy engage. It is unfortunate when anyone dies during war, but I vaguely remember the U.S. government urging all journalists to leave Baghdad weeks before coalition forces rolled into town.

At the time of this writing, the Washington Post has reported that the U.S. branch of Amnesty International is sharing in the criticism: "Unless the U.S. can demonstrate that the Palestine Hotel had been used for military purposes, it was a civilian object protected under international humanitarian law that should not have been attacked.”

The Post did mention that officers reported being fired upon first, but noted that no journalists corroborated that account. Perhaps it would have been more fair, though, for the Post to point out that journalists inside a hotel might not have quite as good a vantage point as actual soldiers inside a tank taking fire.

Nobody wants war, but if there is one good thing about it, it’s that it makes people pick sides. Most of us don’t expect journalists to abandon their beliefs if they happen to cover events that they don’t necessarily agree with. We’d just like them to wait until they’re off the air to pick which side they’re on.


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Trevor Bothwell is editor of The Right Report and author of the cookbook, 50 Ways to Impress Your Girlfriend’s Parents. He is a former elementary school teacher and college instructor.