A Journalist Answers The Question, Why Ignore Michael Yon's Scoop?

A "journalist whose name you'd recognize," Instapundit says.

Yon's story doesn't get attention because it is humiliating.

It is humiliating because it is obvious that we media – and our allies in the state department, the legal trade, the NGOs, the Democratic Party, the UN, etc., - can’t do squat about such determined use of force.

Our words, images, arguments and skills can’t stop the killing. Only the rough soldiers and their guns can solve the problem, and we won’t admit that fact because the admission would weaken our influence and our claim to social status.

I think that's only partly the reason, though, because the media obviously doesn't have much problem reporting on the discovery of sixty-three-bazillion headless bodies in the Green Zone motor pool. And obviously, they can't do a damn thing about that, either.

Part of it is just more basic: simple vanity. Journalists' status comes from their presumption that they, and only they, have the skills necessary to report big stories.

They have an emotional investment in this ego-serving proposition.

If a non-accredited gate-crasher like Michael Yon breaks a story, it must therefore have not been a big story in the first place, otherwise, of course, they would have covered it first, right?

And something a little more than that: It embarrasses them they they seem to rely on emails from shady police operatives for their "scoops" -- without even bothering to visit the alleged site of massacres -- while Michael Yon is actually out in the field, slogging through the sand, digging -- quite literally -- for the stories they're supposed to be oh-so-expert at reporting on.

While they sit in the Intercontintal Hotel "reporting" what agenda-driven tipsters and outright hoaxers simply drop into their email box, this non-reporter is actually acting as the real sort of reporter they always dreamed of one day being. Before deciding it was just too darn difficult.

But also-- what this other guy said, too.

Thanks to CJ.

posted by Ace at 10:39 PM

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