The Self-Hating Media and the Cult of Militarism
Press Action
Saturday, February 12, 2005
http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/hand02122005/
By Mark Hand
"General Mattis—arguably our most effective combat leader—already has been ably defended by my friends Ralph Peters and Mac Owens. But I enthusiastically second his sentiment. If I were still a young Marine, I would take enormous pleasure in personally sending Islamofascists to hell.”
-Jack Kelly, Toledo Blade
Jack Kelly, a staff writer and columnist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Toledo Blade, says he would find “enormous pleasure” in killing certain Muslims if he were in the military today. In the same piece, Kelly describes a high-ranking U.S. military man, who recently said it’s “helluva lot of fun to shoot” people in Afghanistan, as “arguably our most effective combat leader.”
When he’s not trumpeting the feats of the U.S. military, Kelly enjoys expressing his dislike for the mainstream media, even though he works for the leading newspaper in Pittsburgh, not the other daily in town owned by far right-winger Richard Mellon Scaife.
Recently, Kelly and his fellow U.S. militarists have been in a huff over remarks made by a CNN executive at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, about the U.S. military allegedly targeting for killing journalists in Iraq. Kelly wonders why the comments of Eason Jordan, who stepped down Friday as chief news executive at CNN, haven’t made headline news in the mainstream media, especially if it turns out he “slandered U.S. troops” by saying they intentionally killed reporters without any proof.
Kelly isn’t alone in denouncing Jordan. Membership in the cult of U.S. militarism is universal within the halls of power in Washington. Two members of Congress attending the Davos confab — Democrats Barney Frank and Christopher Dodd — also were troubled that the CNN executive would make such a claim.
Dodd’s office released a statement that said he “was not on the panel but was in the audience when Mr. Jordan spoke. He—like panelists Mr. [David] Gergen and Mr. Frank—was outraged by the comments. Senator Dodd is tremendously proud of the sacrifice and service of our American military personnel.”
Jordan told the Washington Post he “was trying to make a distinction between ‘collateral damage’ and people who got killed in other ways.” He cited the shooting of a cameraman outside Abu Ghraib prison and the U.S. shelling of Baghdad’s Palestine Hotel, where many journalists were staying.
Intentional or not, the U.S. military has killed several journalists in Iraq. The U.S. press never focused too closely on the killings in the first place. And now the Eason Jordan fiasco has become another case of the media turning the spotlight on the bearer of bad news about the U.S. government, instead of the message he delivers. You’d think members of the U.S. press would be deeply interested in learning more about the killings of their colleagues that have occurred as a result of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. Instead, the cult of the U.S. military is trumping reason and justice.