The Media Ignores the Patriots

From McBride’s Media Matters:

. . . an account of a American soldier who died fighting terrorists in Iraq, and an eloquent letter he wrote, knowing he might die, asking “Please don’t ever forget what I died for, and never let anyone disrespect that.”

McBride asks the following question about how the media have handled issues like this:

Why don’t we hear more about people like him? What has bothered me about the Cindy Sheehan circus is not that she isn’t entitled to her point of view - she is. It’s that her viewpoint has been given an inordinate amount of media attention; the sheer amount of press has had the effect of giving her viewpoint more legitimacy than others, while at the same time the media have softened her extreme edges. But the words of Evans got one news story in a local paper and that was pretty much it.

Few in the media are so poisonously leftist that they have contempt for America’s soldiers, but certain biases still affect the coverage. Reporters are heavily liberal, and like things that are bad news for President Bush. They like the idea of “dissent,” gravitate toward “dissenters” and are just a bit embarrassed by patriots. Some of the older ones, especially, remember the huge rush of self-righteousness they had during the Vietnam War, and want to see this war as just like that one.

Put all this together, and it’s a recipe for biased coverage.