What Should The Media “Frenzy” Itself About?

7:06 pm EST June 1st, 2006 | Politics | Comments Off

The National Review’s media blog approvingly links to the writings of Jed Babbin (see Babbin’s previous dances with fiction here), pre-emptively trying to defuse the impact of what may come out of the Haditha incident.

The impression you get from these people is that when something is damaging to either the Republican president or the Republican party, it should not be reported and is in fact evidence of the media’s liberal-induced frenzy of hate against Republicans. Like much of what the right peddles, this is nonsense.

Something happened at Haditha, and some people tried to keep what happened under wraps. It was only when the media – in this case, Time magazine – probed the story that it became clear something was amiss. The right thinks that international relations can be played the same way as domestic politics, relying on a lack of attention by the public as we collectively flit from one issue to the next (Terri Schiavo! Natalee Holloway! Immigration! John Kerry looks French!). But when it comes to these issues, when it looks as if rogue American servicepeople have murdered innocent people — “frenzy” is not only naturally going to happen – it is important that it does.

The media should have been in a frenzy of skepticism and examined why we went to war, but they were instead in a frenzy of patriotism that limited the dialogue to “when” we would invade Iraq rather than “why” we should have invaded Iraq. That misguided frenzy led to the deaths of thousands and has crippled the war on terrorism. So pardon me if I think that the media shouldn’t just shrug off this incident as the right wishes to be done.

Its funny that the self-appointed morality police are not interested in prosecuting justice in this case, because it may put yet another chink in their poorly constructed “foreign policy”. Saying “well, we’re not as bad as Saddam (or Palestinian terrorists)” is simply not a workable framework. This requires more than the opining of well-heeled pundits or drug addicted racist hypocrites. It requires a “frenzy” of investigation, repudiation and morality.