[quote]JeffR wrote:
Midway Island Demolished. Yorktown, destroyer sunk.
Many US planes lost
June 7, 1942
[/quote]
The funny thing about this thread is that apparently, none of JeffR’s critics know enough history to get the joke.
The joke is that this fake news report is an entirely factually accurate report of the battle of Midway (the greatest US naval victory in the Pacific theater) that makes it sound like a defeat.
The point is that the same kind of aggressively negative spin is present in most REAL reporting on the war in Iraq. For example, they always make sure to tell us when US personnel are killed, but from watching the news, you could be forgiven for getting the impression that all US troops are doing in Iraq is driving around waiting for somebody to kill them.
This impression is, of course, false. Every day our troops are engaging and killing the enemy, AND rebuilding the infrastructure of Iraq, AND training Iraqi police and soldiers to defend their own country. But apparently, the people who decide what we need to see on our nightly news broadcast (yknow, as citizens of a democracy who need to make informed decisions about things like wars) don’t think THOSE stories are worth telling.
The picture of Iraq painted by the nightly news looks a lot worse than the one painted by the guys who are fighting there (as anyone can tell from reading a few milblogs.) That’s a fact. Whether that’s the result of irrational hatred of the president on the part of many people in the news business or not is a matter of opinion (but I believe it.)