The New Republic is being either naive or cynical. This one is a tough call if you want to believe the best about a person, or group of people - in this case a magazine that's been around since the First World War.
By now you've probably read about what Sgt. Mom calls "the latest milblog kerfuffle-du-jour."
The dust-up concerns a series of essays The New Republic has published by a supposed soldier in Iraq who describes anecdotes about his fellow soldiers that are (a) horrific and disgusting, and (b) inaccurate in their details. Of course, (b) simply means another "fake-but-accurate" strand in the MSM tapestry of careless lies and half-truths woven to serve their purposes. With the MSM, f-b-a is a standard sufficient to allow them to print what the rest of us consider slanderous, but which gives them license to put their agenda into the public sphere for consumption by the willing or the unwary.OPFOR blog and The Weekly Standard magazine both question the veracity of the pseudonymous Scott Thomas' stories about his service in Iraq, and then ask their readers to pass judgment based on their own experience of military life.
The commenters on both sites take the stories apart; they do so on the basis of small, telling details. For example, it's not called a "chow hall" in Iraq, and the things on soldiers' heads are no longer "helmets." Nor do enlisted men ever operate as free of the oversight of their NCO's as TNR's "correspondent" would have you believe. In real life, any sergeant or junior officer would take these fellows down based on the ghoulish, sick stories this writer tells. Not to mention what their peers might do to them for such depraved behavior.
Since its inception in 1914 TNR has had a decidedly liberal bent. Its first issue included an essay by Rebecca West which complained about British conservatism. Its current editor says that TNR coined the word " liberalism". I believe him, for his magazine is solidly in the liberals' camp.
In march of this year CanWest, a media conglomerate based in Canada, acquired a majority interest in TNR. Interestingly, when you go to the Canwest site there is no mention of their ownership, though CBC.ca has the details.
...TNR's soldier storyteller is in another category of tale-telling... His brutal, sadistic "recollections" have been created not to entertain but to titillate, and to discredit the American soldier in Iraq. It is obvious that the author has a very tightly focused agenda. It is also obvious that TNR shares his view of our military. If this were not the case then TNR would have published an opposing point of view. At the very least they would have said up front that they had not checked his story.
TNR joins the ranks of those publications which have given in to the temptation to put out material which supports their philosophy whether or not the essays are true. What counts is what the readership is hungering for.
Dean Barnett and Democracy Project and Gateway Pundit are among many who have more details and comments on the above. Note that TNR has published journalistic fakes before.
(For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.)
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