Remember Afghanistan? Iraq?
At 9:55 am (EST) on September 11th, just after the second World Trade Center was struck, Jo Moore, former British press officer sent an email to her colleagues which read “It’s now a very good day to get out anything we want to bury. Councillors’ expenses?.” It is in her honor that I identify one story every Friday afternoon that our wonderful government tried (and failed) to bury.
This week’s Jo Moore award goes to us, the media, for abdicating our responsibility to cover substantively important stories so that we could go live to “Joe the Plumber High School in Just Another Small Town USA” where there are angry people yelling at some congressman about how “Obamacare” is destroying the Constitution. We have also provided you with extensive coverage of the birther movement, the “Cash for Clunkers” program… basically everything but the enormous military campaigns being waged by our troops in Afghanistan (or more accurately “Afpak”) and Iraq.
U.S. troops recently withdrew from Iraqi cities, leaving the Iraqis to fend for themselves. In the next few weeks we are going to find out whether the troops we trained are truly going to be ready to police and protect their own country. Next week, the Afghans are going to be holding crucial elections and the Taliban will do everything they can to make them fail miserably. These stories may not be sexy, but how these events play out will directly affect both our troops and military strategy as well as American interests. That stories of people screaming outnumber the stories of these wars by vast margins should embarrass us. We in the media are not supposed to win the Jo Moore Award… we are supposed to be uncovering what the pols are burying… not burying the stories ourselves.