Squaring the Culture

Why do so many activists imitate soldiers to discredit the US military? And why does the press believe them so readily?

The moderate-left news magazine “The New Republic” (TNR) announced Friday that it cannot stand by the story it published back in July entitled “Shock Troops.” The story was something we’re all used to, a reflection on how war dehumanizes soldiers illustrated by anecdotes relating disturbing behavior by US soldiers.

The problem was that some details of the story did not sound possible to a number of soldiers with experience in theater in Iraq. Michael Goldfarb, blog editor of The Weekly Standard, asked TNR for details he could use to verify the accounts for himself, which began a flood of legitimate questions from the Blogosphere. TNR vowed to get to the bottom of the affair. After four and a half months of contraversy and fourteen pages of explanation, TNR claims it cannot verify that the facts of the story are true, and is no longer standing by them.

During the 18 weeks of TNR’s investigation, the magazine came under serious criticism for an apparent lack of journalistic ethics. The most damning critique I’ve found came from Ed Morrisey at Captain’s Quarters Blog, explaining how TNR told it’s writer, a private stationed in Iraq named Scott Thomas Beauchamp, to stay away from the press until they could finalize their story on the matter — and then told the world that the Army had placed Beauchamp incommunicado. The Drudge Report posted transcripts of conversations between TRN and Beauchamp from the period during which TRN says the Army had Beauchamp locked down and clammed up. Worse, TNR’s complaint about the Army leaking documents to Drudge includes TRN editor Frank Foer claiming that the Army was stonewalling them about a transcript of a conversation in which he, Foer, was one of the participants. (Review Michelle Malkin’s extensive trackbacks on the subject as well.)

In fact, TNR seems eager to make the US Army the fall guy. They have to; the Army’s own report announced that Private Beauchamp admitted to making up two of the stories and falsely claiming to have witnessed the third, saying “he heard about it.” TNR’s 14-page explanation and retraction makes it sound as though the Army pressured Beauchamp into confessing the falsehoods; though this is not completely implausible, it creates a whole new set of charges that need to be verified. Given TNR’s outright lie about the Army preventing them from talking to Beauchamp and their whopper about the transcript, it’s difficult to accept this new set of charges as anything but a continuing effort to cover their tracks.

The political Left over the years has painted the military as a corrupt, barbaric organization inordinately willing to twist reports to keep the public deceived. The problem here is that the political Left, itself, has produced an ever-lengthening list of fabricated critics of the Army. There have been instances of the military covering up incidents; usually, though, the military blows the whistle on itself when this happens. By contrast, it’s taken the advent of the blogosphere to bring the phony news from the Left into the light.

To recap:

• - Jesse MacBeth – Gave interviews and videos all over the internet claiming personal involvement in US military atrocities, only to have it revealed that he’d never even been in the military. (See also Michelle Malkin’s column in Jewish World Review.)
• - Josh Lansdale — Democrat campaign ads contains interviews with Lansdale in which he claims he’d waited six months to be treated stateside for his Iraq-acquired wounds and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Then they removed him from the ads, because it became clear he had not been wounded in Iraq, and probably not wounded at all.
• - Micah Wright — Claiming to be an Army Ranger disillusioned by his experience in the 1989 invasion of Panama, Wright published a book about the wantonness of the US military called “You Back the Attack, We’ll Bomb Who We Want!” Then it was discovered that he’d never been in the military.
• - Jimmy Massey — Claiming from personal experience that the US military terrorized the streets of Iraq, cited in Vanity Fair, AP stories, on NPR, and invited to speak at major events, his accounts were found by investigative journalists from the St Louis Dispatch, and by investigators from the Army, to have been fabricated.
• - Amarita Randall – Interviewed by the New York Times Magazine as part of an expose’ on how women are mistreated by the military, it was discovered that portions of Ms. Randall’s accounts were delusions.
• - John Kerry — Recall his now-infamous recitation of the atrocities found by the Winter Soldier Project, now known to have included the testimonies of “soldiers” who never served. Recall also his “Christmas in Cambodia” claims of an illegal US invasion of a neutral country, in which he claimed to be 500 miles from where he was actually stationed.

And that’s just the recent war instances. There’s been a book written about the slander of the military’s honor in the public retelling of the Vietnam story, “Stolen Valor,” by BG Burkett and Glenna Whitley (Verity Press, Dallas, 1998.) There’s been a great deal of talk about false photojournalism favoring Hamas after the last Israeli incursion into Lebanon. There’s been a flood of instances of invented racism hoaxes, from Tawana Brawley to the Duke Lacrosse team, to the Jena Six. There’s been a flood of Democrat accusations about Republican acts and intentions, alleging revivals of the draft, restoration of Jim Crow laws, personal profit from policy initiatives. And the press willingly swallows and then regurgitates each successive hoax.

This is what happens when journalists become True Believers in a cause and allow the cause to supersede their commitment to journalistic ethics. Ask any journalist, and they’ll tell you they’re committed to the truth. But the behavior of The New Republic, of CBS during the Rathergate hoax, of CNN during the recent primary debates, suggests they have a deeper commitment to furthering the change advocated by Progressive theology than they do to presenting the unvarnished truth. Gone are the days of Murrow, who reminded reporters they “have a right to their own opinion, but not to their own facts.” The result is that they’re prone to believe hoaxes, and not check the facts skeptically enough, because they so deeply believe that what the hoax illustrates is something beyond question.

When I became a Christian as a young man, the branch of Christendom into which I fell was infamous for defending indefensible claims about scripture and science. I recited pretty much what I’d been taught for a decade or more, but was increasingly uncomfortable with some of the positions I’d been taught that seemed illogical. During a time of personal crisis in the late 1980s, I made two personal commitments before God:

1) No question is off limits. God is not intimidated by my scrutiny. He doesn’t need me to defend Him.

2) If I have to bend the evidence to support any position, that position does not deserve my defense.

While I was learning to read, write, and think with integrity, the world of professional journalism seems to have forgotten what integrity means. This is surely why the readership of newspapers and the viewership of TV reporting is dropping so dramatically. It’s also why blogging is becoming so much more popular. We know where to go if we want the truth; and we’re tired of the lies.

Why are there so many frauds? Because they can’t find real incidents to prove their points.

Why does the press believe the frauds so readily? Because they’re committed to the cause, not to the truth.

Let the dupes in the press consider: when the facts don’t support the claims of their cause, might that not mean that their cause is invalid?