Media Mendacity
Remember the media’s effort to be permitted to photograph returning military caskets during the Bush administration? Remember how they forced themselves upon the families of the deceased, seeking to cover what they, the media, claimed was an important story? A story so important that even then-Senator Biden realized it?
“”These young men and women are heroes,” Vice President Biden said in 2004, when he was senator from Delaware. “The idea that they are essentially snuck back into the country under the cover of night so no one can see that their casket has arrived, I just think is wrong.”
Without Bush to harry and hound, the media apparently has lost interest in “this important story,” given the lack of political hay to be made.
“So far this month, 38 American troops have been killed in Afghanistan. For all of 2009, the number is 220 — more than any other single year and more than died in 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2004 combined.
With casualties mounting, the debate over U.S. policy in Afghanistan is sharp and heated. The number of arrivals at Dover is increasing. But the journalists who once clamored to show the true human cost of war are nowhere to be found.“
Now that this has become Obama’s war, especially in Afghanistan, the media has decided that covering this story is no longer important, embargoing it through their silence far more effectively than any Pentagon policy.