This whole story about armored U.S. military vehicles in Iraq is a great illustration of the pack-mentality of today’s media.
A Tennessee reservist asks why his comrades are having to dig through the dump to shore up their vehicles. And within 24 hours the issue of armed vehicles is headline news on all the major news outlets and the Department of Defense is having multiple press conferences on the topic.
Only thing is, there’s really nothing “new” here to report, because anyone following this war has known of the armored vehicle shortage for months. So what does the media “report” about this? Well, they spend one news cycle covering the fact that the reservist asked Rumsfeld a question about the armor (apparently something they’ve been unable to do for the past year. Then they cover more press conferences. Then they cover the fact that the reservist was “coached” by a reporter (why someone needed “help” to ask that question beyond me. Then last night they covered how Bush said if he was over there he might ask the same thing.
What was missing from this discussion? A number of the reports failed to mention that Bush, as commander in chief, could and should have been asking Rumsfeld that question a long time ago. And very few actually dug into the why of the shortage issue. But that would have required someone to do some actual research rather than following the cluster of press corp microphones around and repeating what they heard.
Our news media is great, isn’t it?