Column: Liberal media run scared

By Stephen Dick
THE HERALD BULLETIN (ANDERSON, Ind.)

ANDERSON, Ind. March 13, 2008 04:26 pm

— If there are people who still still believe in the myth of the liberal media, they need only read an article in the Dec. 10, 2007, The New Republic called “The Fog of War.” It’s a whimpering, simpering cave-in to the noxious right’s bullying-without-evidence method.
The New Republic is a moderately liberal publication except when it comes to U.S. and Israeli nationalism. A decade ago the magazine went through a soul search when one of its writers, Stephen Glass, was found to have fabricated his stories. Since then TNR, and many media outlets, has been overly sensitive about fabulists.
Enter Scott Thomas Beauchamp, a soldier in Iraq who contributed first-person accounts of the war to TNR’s Diarist column. The Weekly Standard, the Fodor’s of neoconservatism edited by the terminally wrongheaded William Kristol, saw some things in Beauchamp’s writings that the magazine didn’t like. The writings didn’t fit the Standard’s cheerleading on the war and the placement of halos above soldiers’ heads.
One example was Beauchamp’s description of some soldiers making fun of a disfigured woman who sat near Beauchamp and other soldiers. Another concerned a soldier who aimed his military vehicle at stray dogs. Kristol wrote that TNR’s editors “must have wanted to suspend their disbelief in tales of gross misconduct by American troops.”
TNR launched a detailed investigation of Beauchamp’s writings, grilling the soldier on every detail he wrote. It culminated in a lengthy mea culpa written by TNR editor Franklin Foer that declared the magazine couldn’t stand by Beauchamp though TNR never proved him wrong.
The Weekly Standard, with no evidence of its own but incensed that its pro-war, holy troops agenda was under attack, could declare another victory for right-wing manipulation of the media. That TNR would offer up a white flag so easily is disturbing and illustrates the difficulty of any liberal finding a voice in the right-wing shout machine. Interestingly, the Beauchamp columns were not political. The Standard made them that way to attack TNR.
A Weekly Standard flack named Michael Goldfarb wrote TNR that Beauchamp’s columns “sounded concocted by a writer with an overactive imagination,” as Foer retold it.
It’s a safe bet that no one at either publication has any military experience.
Do soldiers really exhibit such gross insensitivity in war (or peace) conditions? You bet. Take a look at a photo in a recent issue of Rolling Stone: A couple of soldiers are grinning as they lift up the severed head of an Iraqi. In a war zone, a solider makes life and death decisions based on whatever he perceives a situation to be, not necessarily its actuality. That gives him power. Plus, he’s convinced he’s superior to the human wreckage he helped create. He’s also taught that the enemy is less than human. In a lawless zone, he’s going to do things that a more genteel society, represented by cloistered, detached editors, would be horrified by.
This is nothing new. The atrocities committed by Americans in Vietnam and Abu Ghraib didn’t occur in a vacuum. The soldiers are under unspeakable stress, and they’re going to seek psychological one-upmanship with their “enemies” and seek relief in admittedly bizarre and dark behavior. There’s also a mob mentality that produces reactions to situations that individuals might not do.
The editors of The Weekly Standard, if they’re intellectually honest, understand this. But their agenda comes first. All they have to do is scream foul (after all, they are reactionaries) and right, wrong, good, bad, evil and evidence thereof don’t matter.
Why TNR would give The Weekly Standard, considering its lineage, any credibility is a mystery. To see TNR cave in because it couldn’t dot every i and cross every t is to wonder if we’ll ever know what is going on in Iraq.
It’s true that editors have to be careful for their publication’s integrity. But when something can’t be proven wrong, writers need to be given the benefit of the doubt. Without that, we wouldn’t have had David Halberstam voicing early concerns about Vietnam or Woodward and Bernstein bringing down the corrupt Nixon administration.
The magazine also has to maintain its integrity when it is attacked politically. TNR failed in both counts, and The Weekly Standard gets a victory when it should have been ignored.

Stephen Dick writes for The Herald Bulletin in Anderson, Ind. He can be reached at steve.dick@heraldbulletin.com.

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