"You want your story told. I badly want a story to tell"

"One of the key characters is an American journalist [Arthur Kennedy as Jackson Bentley, above], obviously inspired by Lowell Thomas, who single-handedly retailed the Lawrence myth to the English-language press. The journalist admits he is looking for a hero to write about. Lawrence is happy to play the role," wrote Roger Ebert -- before his dumbing down as a celebrity movie reviewer -- in a brilliant review of "Lawrence of Arabia" way back when. Excerpt from the Robert Bolt script:  "Bentley: Also, my interests are the same as yours. You want your story told. I badly want a story to tell. Feisal: Ah, now you are talking Turkey, are you not?"

"I think that if there’d been military blogs during Vietnam, it would have come out a bit differently, possibly," says Sgt. Mom of The Daily Brief milblog consortium in her Pajamas Media profile. We want to believe she's on to something:

I couldn’t bear to see the Iraqis get sold out the way the Vietnamese did. The reason I joined the military was that I’d worked with Vietnamese refugees.

I also love that it takes clueless reporters out of the mix. They got into it after Watergate to make a difference, and they made one, but it wasn’t a good difference. There are too many reporters who are superficial generalists skimming over the top. It’s so easy to get ‘experts.’ You get the quote and you go to press. I know how easy it is because I did it, in-house government hack that I was. It’s dead easy, and very superficial.

Back at her own blog, Sgt. Mom expands on the theme, music to our ears:

The major media is debased coinage. I can’t take it as a given any more, that what I see, or read, or hear from them is true. My assumption is, that they have their own agenda, I will have to do a bit of fact-checking, and wait for a while before I can come to any sort of conclusion about what I have had put in front of me -- make allowances, tease out the implications, come to my own conclusions from the jig-saw assembly provided to me.

It all kind of reminds me, in a minor way, of what people in the former Soviet Union had to do -- and that is a sad comment on what the major media has become. Eager young journalism majors used to burble that they wanted to be reporters so they could make a difference. So they have . . . but not a good difference.

It's former soviet dissident Natan Sharansky's old fear societies vs. free societies thing, blogged here early and often:

A repressive society is a repressive society, wherever it may fall on a continuum of brutality and thought control. The crushing of dissent brutalizes the human spirit. Sharansky's optimism encourages the human spirit to soar.

The milbloggers always get it right.

Comments

[goomp]

The book America's Thirty Years War says it all about how the leftist socialist culture that has spawned the thinking that ideas about how intellectuals would like things to be are more important than the way things really are. That is the basic MSM program. The blogs emphasize the origional U S ideas that freedom is not being under the rule of elites and their ideas that are not connected to human nature.