Yet another elitist NewsJournal Editorial

mid-afternoon on Saturday, the 15th of November 2003 by Scott

Kind Editor:
In your November 15 editorial, you argue that the Pentagon should change it’s media policy to allow press to show coffins arriving at Dover AFB. You state that without still pictures of coffins arriving from Dover, “the public doesn’t think about the number of fatalities”.

Given the fact that nearly every media outlet records the number of soldiers killed and wounded in each attack, you believe that the American public isn’t aware of the lives of our sons and daughters in foreign lands?

Has it ever occurred to you that the American public does indeed know the cost, but believes it is worth it to create a free and prosperous Iraq? One that doesn’t gas its own citizens or threaten its neighbors? One that doesn’t support terror in Israel, the Middle East and elsewhere? One that does not pursue nuclear weapons to blackmail other nations or pass along to terror groups?

In the 1980s I belonged to Amnesty International and we wrote letters to Saddam appealing to him to stop abusing human rights. Those letters didn’t stop Saddam: the American military and its allies did.

Newspapers like yours that believe war is never justified cannot understand a public that can support a war. You believe that we are brainwashed, and that pictures of coffins will break the administration’s hold over us. Such an opinion is elitist and shows that you have no respect for the common citizen to make up our own minds. We don’t need the media, the UN, the Arab Street or France to decide for us. We can decide for ourselves.

Regards,
Scott Kirwin

PS: These guys need a spanky really bad….