Nightline controversy

Discussion in 'Politics' started by AAAintheBeltway, Apr 30, 2004.

  1. I understand your conflict. The best of you wishes to pay homage to the dead. The political side of you wants to sweep it under the rug and impugn the motives of ABC.

    Because there might be negative ramifications for Bush 2004 and even if ABC had less than honorable motives, is that any reason to suppress the images of the dead. 736 dead in a country of 300,000,000, most of us won't even know someone who knew someone who got killed. The dead are the tip of the iceberg in terms of cost of war really, with wounded, the vets and gaurdsmen away from home, the debt and expense, etc., the national anxiety over the war.

    Clinton, you know, rejected Rumsfeld's plea to invade Iraq in 1998. Rummy and Co. had at least 5 years to work on the postwar scenarios.
     
    #21     May 1, 2004
  2. just like they do with the enemy they do with our dead - keep them faceless so no one knows the price of flesh thats paid.
     
    #22     May 2, 2004
  3. the vietnam wall has been touring the country - that might of tipped this off to air now
     
    #23     May 2, 2004
  4. Pabst

    Pabst

    Don't count on Koppel for whole war story

    May 2, 2004

    BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST


    According to Ted Koppel, dragging his gravitas like a ball and chain, ''The most important thing a journalist can do is remind people of the cost of war.''

    So on Friday night on ABC he read out the names of the American men and women to die in Iraq.

    Is reminding people of the ''cost of war'' really the most important thing a journalist can do? Costs don't exist in a vacuum, but relative to their benefits. For example, the cost of Ted Koppel to ABC is said to be $6 million per year. That sounds a lot when you consider that Skip, the busboy at Denny's, would be happy to do it for $28,000, but cost alone doesn't factor in the benefits of Ted's distinctive portentousness.

    Likewise, the cost of war is a tragedy for the families of the American, British and other coalition forces who've died in the last year. But we owe it to the dead, always, every day, to measure their sacrifice against the mission, its aims, its successes, its setbacks. And, if the cause is still just, then you honor the fallen by pressing on to victory -- and then reading the roll call of the dead.

    If that doesn't quite have the sweeps-month ratings appeal ''Nightline'' is looking for, since Ted has now established himself as a $6 million list reader he might like to remind people of the comparative costs of war. At two seconds per name, to read out the combat deaths of the War of 1812 he'd have to persuade ABC to extend the show to an hour and a quarter. To read out the combat deaths of the Korean War, he'd need a 19-hour show. For World War II, he'd have to get ABC to let him read out names of the dead 24/7 for an entire week. If he wants to, I'd be happy to fly him to London so he can go on the BBC and read out the names of the 3,097,392 British combat deaths in World War I, which would take him the best part of three months, without taking bathroom breaks, or indeed pausing for breath.

    As Stalin said, one death is a tragedy, 1 million is a statistic. The fact that America's dead in Iraq are not yet statistics, that they're still small enough in number to be individual tragedies Ted can milk for his show tells you the real cost of this war. In Afghanistan, the numbers are even lower, which is why ''Nightline'' hasn't bothered pulling this stunt with America's other war.

    Yes, the dead are husbands, wives, fathers, daughters, best friends, and for those who knew them in that capacity the loss is grievous. But Americans know them only as warriors, and they should honor them as such. Those British losses in the Great War reached deep into every family in the land. By contrast, in a nation of 300 million, the vast majority of families are personally untouched by military deaths, and that, paradoxically, makes it easier for the defeatists to exploit the small number of the dead as evidence of the hopelessness of our cause. The historically low rate of combat fatalities amplifies each one.

    Here's where it's worth considering the cost of Ted Koppel in the broader sense. Our enemies have made a bet -- that the West in general and America in particular are soft and decadent and have no attention span; that the ''sleeping giant'' Admiral Yamamoto feared he'd wakened at Pearl Harbor can no longer be roused. If he could, he'd be a problem. But he's paunchy and effete and slumped in his Barcalounger, and he's defining decadence down: In Vietnam, it took 50,000 deaths to drive the giant away; maybe in Iraq, it will only take 500; and maybe in the next war the giant will give up after 50, or not bother at all. He has the advantage of the most powerful army on the face of the planet, but he doesn't have the stomach for war, so it's no advantage at all. He's like the fellow with the beautifully waxed Ferrari in the garage that he doesn't dare take on the potholed roads. If you're predisposed, like many Islamists and many Continentals, to this stereotype of the soft American, then the lazy, ersatz pacifist mawkishness of ''Nightline'''s gimmick pretty much confirms it: That's the cost of Koppel reminding us of ''the cost of war.''

    Last week, watching John Kerry explain that he threw away his medals/his ribbons/some other guys' medals because ribbons are the same as medals/he didn't have his medals with him/his medals are personal to him/and anyway what about Bush's National Guard service, I began to resent the senator for miring this election campaign in a three-decade old quagmire. It's like an oldies station with only one record:

    ''Throw Some Feller's Ribbons O'er The Old Stone Wall

    It's been 30 years

    But I still can stall''

    I don't care about his medals or about Vietnam. But I care about him trapping this new war in the prism of an old war America lost. Koppel's ''Nightline,'' after all, is in direct descent from the old Life magazine pictorials intended to demoralize. Kerry's spent so much time filtering his candidate persona through his Vietnam experience that he's given no serious thought to the war we're in the middle of. His current position is that we need to put the U.N. in charge -- presumably so they can get the oil-for-fraud program up and running again. It's barely credible even as boilerplate. In a testimony to Kerry's own peculiar psychology, he's not only the first Vietnam combat veteran but also the first prominent anti-Vietnam campaigner to run for president. And, even though the media don't care much for the senator, he's somehow seduced them into his weird preoccupation.

    It's unbecoming to a great power, and very perilous. The cost of war is the cost of losing it measured against the cost of winning it. We can reach our own conclusions about which the coalition's dead would opt for.
     
    #24     May 2, 2004
  5. The press has a function that Government and private industry will never, ever fulfill.

    That function is to be a watchdog on the misuse of power by the Government, and to report the corruption of corporate America.

    We know damn well that power corrupts, that money buys influence, and that if the press is not vigilant about keeping the citizens informed of the misuse of power and levels of corruption we see in big business, who will let us know what is really going on?

    The Government is not a watchdog on itself, nor is corporate America.

    Most of the old timers in the press and media view the ownership of the press and media by big business as the major problem these days, as well as watching the press caving into the intimidation tactics of Bush and Company, coupled with visceral and unchallenged attacks by hatchet people who employ Limbaughesque methods and Coulterism speak in their goal to silence the press as a means of advancing the neocon agenda without scrutiny and liberal challenges.

    Some say "my country right or wrong" and that may be true, but I for one want to know when they are doing something wrong. Our elected officials may represent our country for a particular time period, but we should never marry them nor their agendas in a changing world.

    The type of neutered media we have today is a major weakness in our society, and is one of the first intuitions to crumble when a totalitarian and secretive government take shape.

    We live in a different age than 100 years ago, when information wasn't instant. We have greater exposure to information today than in the past, It is imperative now, more than ever, to have a press and media that is free to report news and fact.

    In the case of Koppel, what he reported is fact. Since when do we want to silence fact?

    The greater issue to me is why is he the only one willing to do it? Why have controversy over speaking fact?

    Why don't we as a society want to know? Why do we want the "business of war" to be removed from our lives, to be viewed as something distant and not a part of our lives? We know why the Government wants to keep our attention away from the misery of war, but where is the spirit of Americans who seek truth, justice, and the American way?

    Is the American way now to ignore the names, faces, and body bags of brave Americans who sacrificed their live following orders of our commander and Chief?

    Making war a distant process anesthetizes us to the next unnecessary war, and the next unnecessary war, and the next unnecessary war.....under the prompting of those who seek serial wars to maintain the most profitable war machine.


     
    #25     May 2, 2004
  6. Pabst

    Pabst

    War has it's own unique, horrific emotional baggage. Being pro-war is like being pro-death penalty or pro-reproductive choice(abortion). It's not an issue that even supporters glorify as an act. While I was very mixed about the decision to forcibly remove Hussein (just as I would have been an isolationist in 1940), the role of the press should be above the entertainment fray. And yes I look cynically upon Nightline's stunt as ratings driven. I don't see it as anti-war as much as I see it as $$ producing sweeps period programing. That aside ABC can do what they want. So can their affiliates. Free world after all.

    No argument here that the press is the most important watchdog a democracy has. Perhaps diminished these days by the internet and other wireless communications. Even an educated Iranian can now read Matt Drudge.

    However ART in the post 9/11 mania there were no Nightline's or NYT's editorializing that America shouldn't make the same mistake as we did after the bombing of the Maine. The media was silent about the fanatical Islamic underpinnings that had been repressed by Saddam's imposed secular state. The media often portrayed Shiites as victims. As I stated last year here on ET, many that Saddam had killed were not the types who would embrace the West. Where was the media on that angle. Clearly there's no tangible money payoff in that type of mass media reporting/analysis. Thus we're left with base imagery. Sad. The problem with the media being an independent watchdog of big business and big government is the simple fact that the media is big business. The media doesn't lead or shape public opinion, it merely amplifies the wanting of the crowd. Since market news is what many of us here know best, we often laugh at the inane cheerleading of CNBC. What makes us think that on public policy issues the networks have any better grip on affairs than they do business?
     
    #26     May 2, 2004
  7. #27     May 5, 2004