Category: Media

I’ve been fighting this battle for thirty years – Jefferey MacDonald was never a “Green Beret”, but the media likes to refer to him as such because it’s much more dramatic and anti-military to do so. In today’s USAToday, Maria Puente tries to perpetuate the myth.

Jeffery MacDonald, a Fort Bragg doctor who happened to be assigned the 5th Special Forces Group there as a surgeon, murdered his wife and daughters in their government quarters in 1970, then blamed it on drug-crazed hippies who chanted “acid is groovy, kill the pigs” while they murdered his family. He’s unsuccessfully fought the 1979 conviction. But, the media has been trying to pin it on his military training.

MacDonald never attended, let alone graduated from, the Army’s Special Forces Qualification Course. He was a doctor, the only training he got from the Army was the same training every other doctor on the planet gets. I don’t care about the case at all, certainly I feel sorry for his wife’s family, but someone needs to start editing these so-called journalists who continue to get MacDonald’s qualifications wrong.

So some dingus is writing a new book and all these years later, the media leans on it’s old stereotypes. Even the best selling 1983 book about the crime, Fatal Vision, the cover has merely a Green Beret on the cover;

The USAToday story begins;

The ex-Green Beret doctor convicted of killing his pregnant wife and two little daughters at Fort Bragg in 1970 is locked away in federal prison, and under usual circumstances would never be heard from again.

I am so sick of this media goofiness.

The Mainstream Media (MSM) – geez, you just gotta love that commitment to the environment!

Reporting is hard work.  It sometimes means you have to do some leg work and fact checking – like background research, follow-ups, calling people, and (gulp!) sometimes even go somewhere and interview sources.

But all of that takes time.  And all of it –  particularly the background research and travel – can be really bad for the environment.

So in the spirit of going green, some members of the MSM are truly into “green” reporting, such as low-impact writing and recycling.  It’s critically important to help preserve Mother Earth/Gaia, you know.

Of course, some old fogies just don’t understand the concept of green reporting.  They have mean, pejorative names for it.  They actually call low-impact writing MSU (“making sh*t up”).  And they call recycling “plagiarism”.  Those bastards!

Such heartless meanies.  They’ve even made serious trouble for many reporters who were simply trying to save the planet because of those  efforts.  Just look at Janet Cook – who received the Pulitzer Prize for a primo example of low-impact writing – but gave it back, doubtless under duress   Or Christopher Newton, who wrote over 40 stories in the early 2000s of the same type, saving God only knows how many tons of pollution through avoiding travel, phone calls, interviews, and fact-checking.   Or Jason Blair, who did the same at the New York Times.    And there are any number of other, similar incidents throughout the last 30 years or so.  All they were trying to do was reduce the environmental impact of their work.  And they got crucified for trying to save the planet.  Crucified!

And Blair was also bigtime into saving the planet through recycling.  (Those  unenlightened meanies call it plagiarism, but hey – they”re simply not “thinking green”, remember?)   Blair recycled extensively in his work.  And now we have the current example of Fareed Zakaria, of Time/CNN/Washington Post, who’s just shown everyone he’s truly green by doing the same.  But they – and countless others – paid a heavy price for their work on behalf of all of us.  They got hammered by “the man” when they were simply trying to save the planet!

Hey, recycling like that really cuts down on the environmental impact of writing a story!  (Just remember not to do too many Google searches.)

All eventually got called on the carpet for their heroic acts by those mean old fogies who insist on some things they call “accuracy” and “professional standards”.   But we all know that was simply unfair and shortsighted.  After all:  those heroes were simply trying to do whatever they could to save the planet.  What’s a little . . . cutting corners or stretching things when the planet’s future is at stake!

In fact, they need our help today!  Free Fareed Zakaria!   Free Fareed Zakaria!  Free Fareed Zakaria! Free Fareed . . . .

 

 

(Just in case anyone missed the obvious:  yes, the above article is definitely sarcasm.  And the idea that the IT industry is bad for the environment is absolute bullshit, too.   The IT industry has been a huge net plus for mankind environmentally, enabling virtually everything to be done with far less use of resources than would be possible otherwise.)

We all know the media lives on sensationalism. But the willingness of the media to manufacture the sensational out of nothing is sometimes breathtaking.

Take this article from the LA Times. Here, the headline breathlessly reads “Sikh temple shooting: Gunman had been on investigators’ radar”. The article goes on to begin

Federal investigators had “looked at” Sikh temple gunman Wade Michael Page more than once because of his associations with right-wing extremists and the possibility that he was providing funding to a domestic terrorist group, but law enforcement officials at the time determined there was not enough evidence of a crime to open an investigation, a senior U.S. law enforcement official said.

The implication is obvious: Federal law enforcement knew about the guy and should have been investigating him as a domestic terrorist. If they had, they might have prevented this tragic incident.

However, later in the article a rather key fact comes out.

But the FBI is prohibited under federal law from collecting information on U.S. citizens not suspected of committing a crime. In order to open a domestic terrorism investigation, FBI agents must believe a suspect has threatened violence, has broken federal law and is trying to advance a political or social agenda.

So, the media states that federal law enforcement knew about the guy, thus implying authorities could (and should) have prevented the crime. But they later admit that federal law prohibits federal law enforcement from collecting information on US citizens who aren’t criminal suspects. And the guy, while apparently a racist idiot, hadn’t done enough to warrant suspicion of a crime – and thus an investigation.

Great journalistic work, LA Times. Imply one thing in the lead-in, then undercut your own implications later in the same article. Sheesh.

If the LA Times has a problem with the underlying law that bars federal US law enforcement collection of info on US citizens who aren’t suspects, they need to state that fact. But that is also tantamount to sanctioning a police state.

Gee, ya think that maybe that’s why the LA Times didn’t “go there”?

And if you don’t want to “go there”, LA Times – don’t castigate law enforcement for obeying the law. That’s rank hypocrisy.

I don’t want to dwell on this whole Sikh shooter thing like the media seems to be, but on my way out the door at work today, I heard Shepard Smith on Fox News make a stupid crack about Page just being just a psy-ops guy but that he worked around the best trained troops in the Army, referring to Special Forces, of course. How does that even rate a comment?

I’m not sure if Smith was saying that Page became a killer through osmosis or if he was infested with Special Forces cooties that jumped on him while he was at Bragg.

How have any of these John Rambo fantasies played out for the media? How many Special Forces guys have gone on a rampage like this? None. They called Jeffery MacDonald the “Green Beret” doctor who killed his family at Fort Bragg decades ago, but he wasn’t special forces, he was a doctor assigned to the unit.

My favorite was Benjamin Colton Barnes (notice the scary three names) who was supposed to have been trained in awesome survival skills and was on the run after he murdered a Park Ranger in Mount Rainier National Park earlier this year. We warned how legendary his skillz were and they found him dead shirtless in the frozen northwest face down in a creek. Those are mad survival skillz.

John Muhammed, the DC sniper, was characterized as an Army trained marksman, but he was a mechanic who saw an M16 once every year when he had to go through marksmanship training and qualify.

Then there’s Tim McVeigh, their favorite. He was a Bradley gunner, and nothing he did that day in Oklahoma had anything to do with what he learned in the military, unless I missed the class on making a truck bomb sometime in my 11 years in a Bradley.

Shepard Smith, along with the rest of the media, were probably disappointed when they found out that Page wasn’t an unleashed Jason Bourne-like killer running the streets like a mad man, kickin’ ass and shooting everyone, but reality doesn’t fit their fantasies.