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What explains the New York Times’ ten-day delay in reporting that U.S. Navy SEAL Lt. Michael P. Murphy would be posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor? The short answer is some people never change. Thirty-five years ago, when the Times’ Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger Jr. was asked by his father about his preference should an American soldier run into a North Vietnamese soldier, antiwar activist “Pinch” responded, I would want to see the American get shot. It’s the other guy’s country.”
Today’s Times has its heroes: the mere names of the dead — their deeds left unsaid — with their words parsed, the anguish of their families, and the predisposed antiwar rhetoric of a very few. Before October 11, 2007, the day the White House announced Lieutenant Murphy’s award, the Times had already written all of what it wanted to say about him. They have “fixed” the news about the War on Terror’s fallen heroes and misrepresented them in their commentaries to further the long-held political agenda of the newspaper’s chairman and publisher. This dates back to the early days of the fights in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
In a May 25, 2002, article entitled U.S. Review of a Deadly Afghanistan Battle Finds Lapses Eric Schmitt slipped in the fact that John Chapman and Jason Dean Cunningham “died” yet they were not the story; the story was “lapses” had resulted in the deaths of seven Americans. Yet nothing in that report supported such an allegation. Here is how one senior officer put it:
It’s very difficult, sitting in an air-conditioned environment with good lighting, to fully appreciate all that happens on the battlefield,'’ said Gen. Peter Pace, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who commanded a marine platoon in Vietnam. ‘’It is an enormously complex, chaotic environment — people shooting at you, things going ‘bang,’ vision obscured, and there’s a lot of things that you don’t even know about.
Those who get their “news” about the War of Terror from the Times will likely never learn that several months later Technical Sergeant John Chapman and Senior Airman Jason Dean Cunningham were both posthumously awarded the Air Force Cross for their actions that day.
While there are literally thousands of untold stories, the Times has named (or alluded to) one fallen soldier many times without ever mentioning his support for the war in Iraq and sacrifice in the service of others. An advanced search of their archives using the keywords ‘Cindy+Sheehan’ reveals 155 entries. Read them and you will discover that her son “died in Iraq,” “was killed in Iraq,” or “was killed in an ambush in Iraq.” What you will not read there about Specialist Casey Sheehan is he volunteered to rescue fellow soldiers who were pinned down by enemy fire, replied, “Where my Chief goes, I go,” when told he did not have to volunteer, and was posthumously awarded the Bronze Star for his valor.
<...> Since 9/11, on all battlefields, more than 4,000 American soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines have earned and been awarded the top six medals for valor, the Bronze Star with ‘V’ device and higher. Conversely, the Times has written and published but four straight stories about the battlefield heroics of the War on Terror’s most highly decorated troops — and not one time has even their heroism made the Times’ front page.
