PressEthic

In Kentucky a day before Thanksgiving, there were broadcasts on every five o'clock news station from our troops in Iraq. The area of Kentucky where I spent Thanksgiving is a small rural area where people live in the same house their entire lives, where people get married straight out of high school and where a lot of people send their children to join the army. I began to wonder whether residents in larger cities such as Los Angeles, New York, Miami, Chicago and Phoenix had to endure continuous laborious broadcasts from the troops in Iraq. The troops looked as though they were reading a script and there wasn't an iota of sincerity in their voices as they repeated over and over how happy they were to be doing their jobs in Iraq. Yeah right. Now that Bush wants to up the efforts in Iraq, places like Kentucky, where people are more likely to run off and join the army, are being saturated with tales of heroism on the holidays. I really lost respect for the new media because of their stereotypical broadcasting and I knew that in other cities it was customary to hear from the troops in Iraq but what I saw in Kentucky was so far from normal. Then on Thanksgiving day I had to hear all day about Bush calling ten troops to wish them a Happy Thanksgiving and see the same tired picture of him grinning on the phone from his lazy chair at Camp David. It was advertising for the army like I've never seen. Forget the pop up ads on the internet and commericals on television- this was so blatant I wondered whether the army sponsored the news.