Soldier Boys
So whether The Tennessean is falling for April Fools pranks or running government press releases as news stories, there seems to be scant attention to detail at 1100 Broadway. Another example of that came on Sunday when our daily paper wrote about a pro-war military group while making them seem like an unbiased collection of soldiers.
On Sunday, The Tennessean reported that Iraq war veterans with the group Vets for Freedom gave an inside glimpse into the 5-year-old conflict, quoting a a positively giddy Army Capt. Pete Hesgeth saying that the surge is working. “We want to get the good news and the truth out to the American people,” said Hesgeth, who serves as the executive director of Vets for Freedom. “Over the last year, we've made incredible progress, groundbreaking progress.”
Of course, as first noted on the local blog Southern Beale, there's one minor, insignificant, irrelevant, little problem—Hesgeth and Vets for Freedom don't even come close to representing a cross section of Iraqi war veterans. In fact, they're an explicitly pro-war veteran group, often featured on FOX News. The group has deep and delicate ties to the Republican Party and even formed a political action committee to help U.S. Sen Joe Lieberman defeat anti-war candidate Ned Lamont. That doesn't mean a newspaper shouldn't write about Vets for Freedom—but please, have it in your heart, to inform the reader of their politics.
