ATCM: 'The Media vs. the Military'

An excerpt from Against the Corporate Media, coming Sept. 10 from Bombardier Books. "The Media vs. the Military" by Kurt Schlichter. 

The dilettante model gave way to the ink-stained-wretch model as newspapers were able to fund their own correspondents instead of having to rely on rich kids’ letters home. World War II saw an explosion of war correspondents sent overseas to satisfy the hunger of the people back home for news about their 12 million menfolk deployed to all corners of the globe in the Great Crusade against the Axis. These young civilian men with notepads were not that different from the young military men with M1 Garands—they even wore the same uniforms (albeit without rank). But more important, they came from the same kind of places and the same kind of families and the same social class.

Ernie Pyle was the quintessential war reporter of the era, the man who told the story of the dog-faced infantrymen and their harrowing, often-short, lives at the front. Pyle was no Yalie slumming it with the proles. Born to a tenant farmer in Indiana, he dropped out of college and did a short stateside hitch as a swabbie in the Navy Reserve during World War I, then took up the pen. He followed the troops through the European theater, sharing their misery, reporting their suffering. His poignant columns were printed in hundreds of newspapers. Then he went to the Pacific theater, and during the fight for Okinawa on April 18, 1945, while accompanying U.S. Army soldiers, he caught a Japanese machine gun bullet below the lip of his helmet. He died at age forty-four, looking seventy-four.

The World War II model of the correspondent serving alongside the soldiers limped on even into Vietnam, where it finally expired during the Tet Offensive when Walter Cronkite treacherously pronounced the war lost to millions of American TV viewers even as U.S. troops were annihilating the Viet Cong troops foolish enough to rise to face them. Joe Galloway of UPI was the exemplar. General H. Norman Schwarzkopf knew him in Vietnam and called him “the finest combat correspondent of our generation—a soldier’s reporter and a soldier’s friend.”

During the first Battle of the Ia Drang Valley in 1965, immortalized in Galloway’s book written with General Hal Moore, We Were Soldiers Once… and Young, he was rumored to have picked up an M16—there were plenty of them lying around—and fought off the North Vietnamese forces attempting to overrun the American 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment. What is not in dispute is that Galloway was the only civilian to receive a Bronze Star medal for bravery in Vietnam—he carried a wounded soldier back to cover under fire. Like Associated Press stringer Marcus Henry (Mark) Kellogg, who was scalped by the Sioux alongside Custer’s men, Joe Galloway knew what side he was on.

By contrast, during a famous 1987 seminar on war reporting in which the moderator posited a scenario where the reporters had learned that an American unit was walking into an ambush, both Mike Wallace and Peter Jennings stated that they would not warn the GIs. In other words, the model from Pheidippides to Galloway of the reporter on the side of the soldier has been replaced by a model embracing some arbitrary, manufactured “higher principle” that privileged a false neutrality over keeping a fellow American from catching an AK-47 round in the belly. Don’t imagine that the soldiers do not know it.

You really can't hate them enough.

Today, reporters are informally embedded within the military hierarchy, mostly in the Pentagon press room, and the result is just what the distance model was proposed to prevent—today, the senior military establishment and the media are working together to jointly push their shared agenda. It’s the grunts who are left out, their stories untold, the incompetence of their leaders covered up by professional courtesy and the cultural affinity those senior military leaders and media figures share. The reporters and the generals are all of a kind—they went to similar colleges (no one becomes a general without at least one advanced degree), they share similar cultural mores and, especially in Washington, D.C., they physically live among each other.

But while the reporters and the generals share the same social class—and, not coincidentally, the same politics—the troops are left out of the lovefest. The media’s military coverage today consists of passing on leaks that advantage the brass and ignoring the scandals created by the brass. The fact that much of war today is special-ops fighting in the shadows instead of mass armies of conscripts on a battlefield means that there will necessarily be much less of the kind of coverage an Ernie Pyle or Joe Galloway might provide.

The media and the soldiers are utterly alien to one another. How many reporters have a brother in the Marines? Probably a lot fewer than have a brother in Antifa. Their paths rarely cross in real life and certainly never will unless the reporter goes to seek the grunts out. But why would he?