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Honoring US Troops is unpatriotic?

Posted by Mark | Filed under Politics

If you’ve been lis­ten­ing to Air Amer­ica Radio you’ve prob­a­bly heard about how the Sin­clair Broad­cast­ing Group has ordered it’s affil­i­ates to kill Ted Koppel’s trib­ute to those of our sol­diers who’ve paid the ulti­mate price for Bush’s war.

If you haven’t been lis­ten­ing to Air Amer­ica Radio, then you really need to start doing so! In the mean­time, here’s the scoop. As reported in the Los Ange­les Times, Night­line & Ted Kop­pel were plan­ning to read the name and dis­play a pic­ture of every US sol­dier killed in com­bat over in Iraq; how­ever they later changed their minds and extended the spe­cial to include every sol­dier killed while serv­ing in Iraq.

This spe­cial episode is clearly intended as a trib­ute to the sol­diers as evi­denced by this quote from the exec­u­tive pro­ducer of Night­line, Larry Sievers:

These peo­ple have paid the ulti­mate price in our name, and it’s impor­tant to remem­ber them whether you think the price is worth it or not. It may not be great tele­vi­sion. But it’s the right thing to do, and that’s why we’re doing it.

To most peo­ple this seems obvi­ous that Night­line is doing some­thing that’s extremely patri­otic; how­ever the Sin­clair Broad­cast Group (amoung other right-wing nuts¹) dis­agrees and says:

“appears to be moti­vated by a polit­i­cal agenda designed to under­mine the efforts of the United States in Iraq.”

It should be noted that SGB owns a large pro­por­tion of the ABC-affiliated sta­tions and their block­ing of this Night­line spe­cial, effec­tively means that most of the coun­try will not get to see it ². After hear­ing all week about how the Bush admin­is­tra­tion is doing every­thing they can to stop peo­ple from truly feel­ing the impact of the war on our troops (e.g. block­ing the pho­tos of the return­ing dead, for more info see TheMemoryHole.org); you’d think the right-wing would let this go through; so that their bash­ing of the left wouldn’t be quite so bla­tant. You might think that, but you’d be wrong.

*shakes head and sighs* What a world we live in, eh?

So why did I go to the trou­ble of post­ing this to my blog? Because it makes it very angry that this SBG it block­ing the spe­cial. Num­bers of the dead or even a list of names don’t bring the full impact of the hor­ror that is war, but maybe just maybe see­ing the faces of those sol­diers will help to wake Amer­ica up about what we’re doing over in Iraq. And maybe that will lead to bring­ing our boys home that much sooner. We can only wait and see what happens.

¹ Another exam­ple is Brent Bozell, pres­i­dent of the Media Research Cen­ter:

I think it’s intel­lec­tu­ally dis­hon­est to deny the par­ti­san nature of this broad­cast. Of course, it’s par­ti­san! What’s the pur­pose? There’s only one goal in mind: It’s to turn pub­lic opin­ion against the war.

² This is accord­ing to Air Amer­ica Radio’s Unfil­tered morn­ing show.

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