Which side?

One has to wonder what side the press is on these days.
In this post, we see how news reporters did their level best to get people captured by the terrorists who had taken over the Taj Hotel in Mumbai.

While watching the Mumbai terror attacks on Fox last week, I heard a Fox anchor, safely ensconced in NYC, interview a frightened Indian man who was hiding in the Taj hotel. He was like a golf announcer, all whispers, and she was the soccer announcer, loudly leading the terrorists to their GOOOAAAL. It went something like this:

He (whispering into his cell phone): It's very frightening, but I think I'm safe.

She: Are you safe? How? Where are you?

He: I'm in my room.

She: How terrible. Are you sure your safe? Where are you?

No kidding. She actually asked twice where he was, as if it never occurred to her that the terrorists might be monitoring the media to find more hostages people to torture and kill. And, it turns out the terrorists were doing just that, and Fox was hardly alone...

The great war correspondents of WWII understood war and enemies and good guys. They were, by and large, discrete when it was important to be discrete, and honest journalists the rest of the time. With Vietnam, we got a new kind of war correspondent, becoming more anti-war as the war moved along, until they became a powerful force for our abandonment of the war. Their reporting may also have helped the North Vietnamese understand our troop movements and strategies.

Now we have a new generation of war correspondents, many of whom never leave their air conditioned suites, few of whom accept that we really are at war. They're reporting incidents not battles, and they proved last week that they're not to be trusted with sensitive information.

As commentary, I pass this along:

Which side is the War Office on? This was the question once asked by a man walking down Whitehall, and the answer he got was: "Ours, I hope."

Things have deteriorated since.

Napoleon is alleged to have said, "Never attribute to malice what is adequately explained by stupidity."  Nice words, but the hard part is deciding at what point mere stupidity is inadequate to the task.