Anti-Military Bias

Monday's The O'Reilly Factor, guest hosted by Laura Ingraham, showed a pre-recorded interview between FNC host Bill O'Reilly and Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, former Commander of Coalition Forces in Iraq and author of Wiser in Battle: A Soldier's Story. During the interview, Sanchez conveyed his disapproval at the mainstream media's coverage of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal. When O'Reilly contended that the "New York Times and the liberal media" "went wild over Abu Ghraib" to "humiliate the Bush administration," Sanchez agreed: "To a large extent, you're absolutely right, because that is reflected in some of the questioning and some, obviously, in the press reports that occurred ... I believe that, in fact, we create the strategic defeat for America to a large extent by the way that we cover it in the press." (Transcript follows)

It appears three times isn't a charm for horror author Stephen King, who in his third attempt at explaining his peculiar remarks about people who can't read ending up in the Army still couldn't muster the strength to apologize to those he's offended.

I guess in his world, literacy means never having to say you're sorry.

On the upside, at least this time he didn't tell anybody to shut up, or blame the outrage on "Guys like [Noel Sheppard who] take their cues from [conservative commentators Rush] Limbaugh and [Bill] O'Reilly."

So, we've got that going for us...which is nice.

But before we get there, let's look at King's strike three as posted at his website Wednesday (emphasis added):

Here is a sad example of the subtle anti-war bias that the MSM constantly hides in stories even when they are heartwarming tales of the great things our soldiers do for the people of Iraq. In this case, it is the Sacramento Bee putting in some almost subliminal anti-war sentiments in the mouth of Staff Sgt. Luis Falcon who worked his heart out to get some prosthetic legs for an 11-year-old Iraqi girl who lost her legs to a road side bomb. This is a wonderful story that is marred by the SacBee's attempt to interject into the story doubt about the war effort in Iraq.

As it happened, Staff Sgt. Falcon made friends with little Shahad Abbas who had been the victim of a road side bomb that was detonated as she was walking to school. Her little brother was killed in the blast. Falcon had been visiting the girl and was bringing her gifts of toys and medical supplies when at last she asked him for new legs so that she might again walk to school.

To his credit, Sgt. Falcon worked his heart out to get the poor girl those prosthetic legs and he succeeded in his goals. It is a heartwarming tale and highlights just one of the thousands and thousands of similar stories being lived out by our soldiers on a daily basis throughout Iraq and Afghanistan.

Don't you just love the MSM? They can't even report good news without interjecting their doom and gloom, agenda driven verbiage into any report. This time it is the Associated Press with the good news that the Marines and the rest of America's armed forces have reached their recruiting goals. In fact, many branches of the service exceeded them. All good news, right? Well, naturally the AP had to throw some cold water on the good tidings. You see, according to the AP the Marines fulfilled their recruiting goals because of a "slow economy" and despite Iraq being an "unpopular war." They just can't let it go, can they?

After giving us the details that the Marines surpassed their recruiting goals the AP had to remind us that U.S. forces were "stretched thin by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan" and that those joining the service are doing so because -- and here is that old canard again -- "other job possibilities" are limited for them.

For Stephen King's benefit, our friends at Are We Lumberjacks have updated an hysterical picture from November 2006 which humorously mocked John Kerry's offensive anti-military remark:

Horror author Stephen King's comments regarding illiteracy and the military have drawn criticism from the United States Army according to a report by CBS-TV affiliate in Washington, DC, WUSA channel 9.

As NewsBusters reported Monday, King recently told a group of high school students at the Library of Congress, "If you don't [read], then you've got, the Army, Iraq, I don't know, something like that."

According to WUSA, Paul Boyce of Army Public Affairs issued the following statement (video embedded right):

The battle between NewsBusters and horror novelist Stephen King went national Tuesday when the Associated Press picked up the story.

For those that haven't been following this, on Monday, NewsBusters reported King's disgraceful comments -- made in front of a group of high school students at the Library of Congress in April -- about people who can't read having few options other than to enlist in the Army.

This surprisingly prompted King to post a blurb at his website encouraging readers to send a message to me stating, "Hi, Noel—Stephen King says to shut up and I agree."

Now, the AP has expressed its view of this squabble, of course, with no mention of King's sorry call-to-arms (emphasis added):

The saga of horror novelist Stephen King's disgraceful comments about America's military took an interesting turn Monday when shortly after instructing visitors to his website to send me a message stating "Hi, Noel—Stephen King says to shut up and I agree," his own message boards were shut down.

This followed the creation of a number of threads by members that wanted to comment about King's remarks.

The cover-story for shutting down the boards came from the Moderator in a thread entitled "Stephen King Insults Soldiers":

It seems to matter little whether the location is Gaza or Baghdad. If there is a way to spin a story, Associated Press reporters will find it.

Today, American forces called in an AC-130 for support when they came under fire in the Kazimiyah district of Baghdad.

The Associated Press editorializes:

The AC-130, a lethal tool used by the military since the Vietnam War, can slowly circle over a target for long periods.

Human rights groups have criticized their use in urban settings where militants may be among crowded populations of noncombatants. The four-engine gunships were also used to support the U.S. attack that took the western city of Fallujah from insurgents in November 2004.

What the Associated Press does not mention is that the modern AC-130U is the most complex aircraft weapons system on the planet, and the reason for its complexity is that the aircraft's sensors, navigation, and fire control systems are calibrated to conduct exceedingly accurate surgical strikes. It is likely because of their precision strike capabilities that the AC-130U was chosen for this mission over other available means of attack.

Remember shortly before Election Day 2006 when Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) suggested that if you don't get a good education, "you get stuck in Iraq" (video available here)?

Well, last month, famed horror author Stephen King was speaking in front of a group of high school students at the Library of Congress, and he virtually made the exact same statement.

For those that can bear it, what follows is another in a long line of liberal media members bashing the military (embedded right, h/t Terry Ann):

On Sunday’s CBS "60 Minutes," anchor Bob Simon talked to members of the Israeli Air Force and asked one pilot, Captain Omri, about air strikes in the Gaza strip in which civilians occasionally are killed:

It's a classic guerilla war. Fifty dollar rockets made in the back alleys of Gaza against Israel's $50,000 missiles. The Israelis will tell you that kind of expense buys precise weapons which limit collateral damage. But it also gives the air force the capability of assassinating their enemy's leadership. The Israelis call this "targeted killings"; the Palestinians call it murder. Have you hit any targets?

Simon then went on to say to Omri: "But I must tell you, your face, your manners, your demeanor, you don't look like a killer. And yet what you do a lot of the time when you're over Gaza, you're killing." The pilot responded: "I agree. I don't think I'm a killer. When I look at my face in the mirror, I don't see a killer."

How bad was Reverend Wright's appearance before the National Press Club this morning? Bad enough that even CNN contributor Roland Martin—who yesterday enthused about Wright's address to the Detroit NAACP, who gave Wright's chat with Bill Moyers an 'A'—flunked it with an 'F.' Bad enough that David Gergen condemned it as "narcissistic almost beyond belief." Bad enough that, introducing a panel discussion of the speech, the palpably distressed CNN Newsroom host Tony Harris let out an audible groan of "ah, boy," and later wondered how much damage had been done.

View video here.

Last February, NewsBusters reported the resignation of retired Col. Ken Allard from NBC News as a result of the military analyst's view the network was undergoing a "precipitous retreat from journalistic and ethical standards."

On Sunday, Allard was more specific, claiming, "I thought they really had moved very slowly to the left, and I also thought that when they had the chance to clarify to the fact that they were not moving to the left, they didn't do so."

CNN's Howard Kurtz set this up on "Reliable Sources":

Time magazine Managing Editor Richard Stengel continued to defend the magazine's doctoring of the iconic Iwo Jima flag-raising photo in a speech April 21 - calling it a "point of view." But perhaps one of the most appalling revelations to come out of Stengel's defense of the photo is his idea of the role of objectivity in running a legitimate news magazine.

During his speech at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Miss., part of the third annual Stuart J. Bullion Lecture, Stengel defied the traditional notion that journalists should be unbiased.

"I didn't go to journalism school," Stengel said. "But this notion that journalism is objective, or must be objective is something that has always bothered me - because the notion about objectivity is in some ways a fantasy. I don't know that there is as such a thing as objectivity."

Although the cover of the April 21 Time magazine has gotten widespread complaints from the veterans and has been scrutinized by the media, a spokesman from Time offered no apology. The magazine had changed for their decision to use the iconic image of the Iwo Jima flagraising to promote global warming activism.

"TIME has the utmost respect for our nation's veterans and we well understand the power of the iconic image of the raising of the flag over Iwo Jima," Daniel Kile, associate director of public relations at Time, said in an e-mail to the Business & Media Institute (BMI). "We believe this is a respectful use of this symbol of American valor and courage and serves to highlight another great challenge facing our nation."

The magazine's cover replaced removed the flag in the famous photo and replaced it with a tree.

The powers at Time magazine, who now approach reporting the issue of climate change with a holier than thou persona, as blogged yesterday by NewsBusters' Mark Finkelstein, have ruffled the feathers of a few Iwo Jima veterans.

The Time cover story by Bryan Walsh calls green "the new red, white and blue." But Donald Mates, an Iwo Jima veteran, said this goes a little too far. He told the Business & Media Institute on April 17 that using the famous Iwo Jima flag-planting photograph for the global warming cause was a "disgrace."

"It's an absolute disgrace," Mates said. "Whoever did it is going to hell. That's a mortal sin. God forbid he runs into a Marine that was an Iwo Jima survivor."

"Memo to Petraeus: When you're making the case for more patriotic gore, go easy on the glitter."

That's how Los Angeles-based writer Matthew DeBord concluded his LA Times op-ed entitled "Petraeus' 'ribbon creep.'"

So DeBord apparently thinks ribbons worn on the service dress uniform are the equivalent of "flair" that Chotchkie's waiters wore in the comedy classic "Office Space"? Here's how DeBord began his screed against Petraeus being decked out in "martial bling":

The New York Times's Kate Phillips filed a dutiful story on offensive comments against John McCain by a Senate Democrat who recently endorsed Barack Obama in Wednesday's "West Virginia Senator Apologizes for McCain Comments."

Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia managed to smear both McCain and fighter pilots in general when he told his home state paper, The Charleston Gazette, on Monday that:

"McCain was a fighter pilot, who dropped laser-guided missiles from 35,000 feet. He was long gone when they hit. What happened when they get to the ground? He doesn't know. You have to care about the lives of people. McCain never gets into those issues."

Phillips led off with Rockefeller's apology, not his offensive comments, then moved quickly on to his endorsement and praise of Obama.

Senator John D. Rockefeller IV personally apologized to Senator John McCain of Arizona on Tuesday after remarking in an interview that Mr. McCain's years as a Navy fighter pilot would not have given him an understanding of everyday issues faced by Americans.

Update:  The media finally wakes up and starts covering this.  I wonder how much Newsbusters had to do with that.

Click here to see video honoring Michael Monsoor and a roundup of blog reactions to the posthumous Medal of Honor ceremony. Many in the blogosphere paid their respects to a true hero, but the media were unsurprisingly absent.

Via Blackfive:

Google News shows that no one, other than local news in San Diego, is covering the awarding of the Medal of Honor to US Navy SEAL Michael Monsoor.

This is quite evident of the MSM's bias. I don't know how you can argue in favor of them today. This story is one that should be told across the nation.

E-mail tipster Mike Huggins pointed out to NewsBusters that as of 4:30 p.m. EDT today, he found but one media mention of Obama backer Sen. Jay Rockefeller's (D-W.V.) smear of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) among the seven major online news sources he checked. Rockefeller's comment, which he now regrets, is also arguably a smear of U.S. military fighter pilots past and present.

From an April 8 AP wire story (emphasis mine):

"McCain was a fighter pilot, who dropped laser-guided missiles from 35,000 feet. He was long gone when they hit. What happened when they (the missiles) get to the ground? He doesn't know. You have to care about the lives of people. McCain never gets into those issues," Rockefeller said.

Sounds kind of like Bill Maher, doesn't it?

Huggins noted that while he searched the Web sites for the Washington Post, L.A. Times, New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, ABCNews.com, and CBSNews.com, he found but one story on the incident and that on ABC's Web site.

In an interview with Hillary Clinton on Tuesday’s CBS "Early Show," about the upcoming congressional testimony of General David Petraeus on the Iraq war, co-host Harry Smith began by asking a question that perfectly toed the Democratic Party line: "David Petraeus is going to come before this committee this morning. He's going to say in more -- you know, more elaborate words than I will right now, that the surge is working. The number of attacks in Baghdad have more than doubled in the last two months. About a dozen U.S. servicemen have been killed there in just the last several days. Do you think the surge is working?" Clinton was very appreciative of Smith’s softball and let him know: "Well Harry, I think you just made a summary argument against the position that it's working."

Smith’s claim that attacks in Baghdad "more than doubled" recently was accurate according to an April 8 New York Times article. However, what Smith failed to also point out was the dramatic decline of attacks during the surge, which preceded the latest round of violence.

Online gossip blog TMZ.com just doesn't know when to quit. In this April 3 post, the site took time from its busy schedule tracking celebrity train wrecks to condescendingly mock former “Bachelor” reality star Navy Lt. Andy Baldwin yet again for retrieving WWII remains. This is the third time TMZ has knocked Baldwin for “diving for old bones."

The bashing began in a March 20 post that explained Baldwin had been part of a Navy dive team assigned to recover the remains of WWII servicemen from a B-24 crash site in the South Pacific. The staff writers criticized the waste of their tax dollars on “ancient history,” musing “let's talk about why we the taxpayers are footing the bill on such BS” and asking readers if they thought it was a “[r]idiculous waste.” TMZ's staff expressed their disbelief that anyone would bother searching for such an old wreck and then dismissed the importance of recovering the remains, snarking, “At least [Baldwin] got a really good tan" (all bold mine):

What, you ask, were they looking for? A B-24J bomber that went down during the war. Not Iraq. Not Vietnam. No, not Korea. We're talking WWII, as in more than 60 years ago.

Turns out, the military spends $52 million each year to find the remains of missing soldiers -- it's part of the POW/MIA program. That's all well and good depending on the circumstances. But a crash that is ancient history, at a time when the economy sucks and the Federal government is sucking the life out of everyone with taxes??

To refresh from what I posted on earlier this morning (NewsBusters; BizzyBlog [third item at post] -- here's the admission from New York Times reporter Qais Mizher, in his report from Basra in yesterday's Times:

Early last week, when the assault started, I happened to be in Diwaniya, another southern city, as part of my work as a reporter and translator for The New York Times.

Calling on my experience as a captain in the Iraqi Army before the 2003 invasion and essentially a war correspondent since then, I headed to Basra to see if I could make my way into the city and see what was happening there.

Yesterday, Richard Miniter at Pajamas Media pointed out that Mizher's self-professed "experience" means that he "was an officer in Saddam’s army."

This is not an April Fool's gag.

Richard Miniter at Pajamas Media caught the jaw-dropping significance of these two paragraphs in a New York Times report by Qais Mizher out of Basra (HT Instapundit; bolds are mine):

Early last week, when the assault started, I happened to be in Diwaniya, another southern city, as part of my work as a reporter and translator for The New York Times.

Calling on my experience as a captain in the Iraqi Army before the 2003 invasion and essentially a war correspondent since then, I headed to Basra to see if I could make my way into the city and see what was happening there.

Miniter, while also noting how vapid and misleading Mizher’s reporting is, emphasizes the jaw-drop:

On Sunday’s "60 Minutes" on CBS, anchor Scott Pelley interviewed Murat Kurnaz, a german-born Muslim man who was released from Guantanamo Bay after five years, having been found innocent of terrorist activity, and as Pelley declared: "At the age of 19, Murat Kurnaz vanished into America's shadow prison system in the war on terror...The story Kurnaz told us is a rare look inside that clandestine system of justice, where the government's own secret files reveal that an innocent man lost his liberty, his dignity, his identity, and ultimately, five years of his life."

Pelley went on to describe Kurnaz’s claims of being tortured by the U.S. military:

Kurnaz claims his interrogations at Kandahar turned to torture. He told us that American troops held his head underwater...Kurnaz says the Americans used a device to shock him with electricity that made his body go numb. And he says he was hoisted up on chains, suspended by his arms from the ceiling of an aircraft hangar for five days.

After Kurnaz described how a doctor would monitor his health during such torture, Pelley asked: "The point of the doctor's visit was not to treat you; it was to see if you could take another six hours hanging from the ceiling?"

Former White House advisor Karl Rove gave a speech at George Washington University on Friday that was disturbed by protestors from the anti-war group Code Pink.

As the "insurgents" were being removed from the Harry Harding Auditorium by security guards, students in attendance could be heard comically shouting "Tase 'em!" (embedded video to the right).

As reported by The Conservative Voice, in between interruptions, Rove had some interesting things to say about the current campaign:

On the 25th, the Washington Post served up a lament for Hollywood's dismal box office returns for the many Iraq war pictures it has churned out over the last several years, wondering why they have all failed so spectacularly? The whole article amounts to the Post just not understanding why moviegoers have stayed away in droves from these dark and dismal movies. But with the anti-Military, anti-American point of view depicted in every single one of these movies, it is no surprise that Americans have ignored these self-denigrating flicks. After all, with soldiers really taking casualties on the battle field, who wants to see a film that tells us all it's OUR fault? Still, the Washington Post is mystified.

After five years of conflict in Iraq, Hollywood seems to have learned a sobering lesson: The only things less popular than the war itself are dramatic films and television shows about the conflict... A spate of Iraq-themed movies and TV shows haven't just failed at the box office. They've usually failed spectacularly, despite big stars, big budgets and serious intentions.

This is really taking their quest to find stories that makes victims out of members of the U.S. military to the farthest degree! The Minneapolis Star-Tribune is apparently now resorting to advertising to dredge up women in the military "whose marriage is ending" for a story they want to write. There is really only one reason they'd want such examples and that is so that they can show that the military is hard on women so as to show the military in a bad light.

Catch this Jerry Springer-like form of modern "journalism":

Reader inquiry: Are you a woman in the military whose marriage has ended?

Are you a woman in the military whose marriage has ended?

We'd like to talk to you for a possible story.

Exactly five years ago, an international coalition of troops led by the U.S. invaded Iraq, overthrowing Saddam Hussein's tyrannical dictatorship in just three weeks. Since then, Iraqis have voted in free democratic elections to seat a representative parliament; Saddam and several of his henchmen have been tried and convicted in public war crimes trials; and a bloody insurgency fomented by al Qaeda in Iraq is in retreat after a surge of U.S. troops and a shift to more aggressive counter-insurgency tactics.

Analysts at the Media Research Center have studied TV news coverage of the Iraq war from the beginning, even before the first bombs fell on Baghdad in March 2003. The record shows the networks have trumpeted bad news — setbacks for the U.S. coalition and allegations of misdeeds by American troops — while minimizing good news such as the success of the 2007 troop surge and acts of heroism by U.S. soldiers.

Apparently, AP's television writer David Bauder just noticed that the Iraq war has been canceled as TV fare lately. Maybe Mr. Bauder should have been reading Newsbusters because our own Rich Noyes noticed how the war had vanished from TV all the way back on Feb. 28th.

Of course, Bauder is trying to spin this neglect as mere "fatigue," as if the war were a fad that people have just grown tired of as opposed to TV losing interest because the war no longer fits the we-can't-win template that the media had been used to following with their coverage.

In fact, the surge has gone so well that even Bauder had to give the campaign its due.