Suggests Christopher Buckley, in the Wall Street Journal:
April 20, 1942: Officials from the Japanese Imperial Ministry of Propaganda and Dissimulation give American reporters a tour of areas of Tokyo damaged in the Doolittle raid. According to the officials, all bombs missed military targets, landing instead on nursery schools, hospitals, temples, infant formula factories and schools for handicapped children.
April 21, 1942: The head of the United Notions expresses “grave concern” over civilian casualties in yesterday’s Doolittle raid over Tokyo.
“If there are to be any more of these so-called ‘daring’ raids over Japanese population centers,” he says, “American pilots must be more sensitive to collateral damage.”
It seems that, at some point (and, to be fair, with some provocation), the media (to overgeneralize) decided that its role was not to support the nation, nor inform the public, but to truly act as a “Fourth Estate”: another, adversarial branch of the government.
An adversarial model, vs. a cooperative model, is in many ways an old American tradition. The “free market” is an adversarial model. And, in fact, such a model, provoking competition, usually leaves the survivors stronger.
The survivors.
Who do the media want to be the surivivors? And what sort of world would that leave behind?
Or maybe, just maybe, they’re not really thinking that far ahead ….
(Via InstaPundit)