Safer
Veteran newsman shares views. There’s some doddering. Hartford Courant:
From the battlefields in Vietnam and Iraq to the combative Katharine Hepburn, Morley Safer gave a few hundred of his friends, fans and fellow congregants of his Chester synagogue a quick tour of his six decades in journalism Saturday.
Safer, a “60 Minutes” correspondent since 1970, drew parallels between wars fought by the United States 40 years apart.
“People are still trying to puzzle out why we were in Vietnam some 40 odd years later,” Safer told a packed house at the Congregation Beth Shalom Rodfe Zedek off East Kings Highway. “We are still puzzling over what we are doing in Iraq. … The similarities are obvious. It is an unwinnable war.”
No, but just like Vietnam, it’s definitely loseable.
And he was equally pessimistic about peace in the Middle East.
“Things are just as intractable now as it was 60 years ago, or even worse,” Safer said. “What Iraq has done has deepened fault lines in the Middle East.”
It certainly has. And the Arabs are jumping over to our side of the gaping maw. That’s why George Bush was able to get nearly every major Arab state — most of which have had it up to here with Hamas — to show up for peace talks in the Great Satan with the Zionist entity.
Now in the last year of his contract with CBS, Safer, 76, engaged the audience in his trademark rolling baritone about life in television news.
While he and other correspondents often regularly aired documentaries on Vietnam during the ’60s, Safer said there is little market today for in-depth coverage of the war in Iraq or other difficult subjects.
“We don’t cover the news anymore, we skim the news,” he said.
I know, it’s really strange. No market? Maybe that’s it. I’ve been trying to figure out whether its because … with the exception of a brave few … they’re chickenshit, or their bosses are worried about insurance costs, or they just don’t want to see what they might find. Iraq is a complex place, good, bad and ugly. But despite some seized-upon voices to the contrary, by and large American soldiers want to fight, want to win and want to go home winners. They are winning, increasingly with Iraqis fighting beside them. The danger is not that we’ll lose. The danger is that we’ll quit. Just like Vietnam. But I agree with Safer. News-wise, it’s a lousy situation, when even our premier news organizations have barely covered this war, and they are being shown up by freelancers like this guy and this one. By Germans, ferchrissakes.
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 1:25 am Comments (5) on Monday, February 4, 2008
5 Responses to “Safer”
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February 4th, 2008 at 3:42 am
Like the Bourbons, Liberals have neither forgotten anything, nor learned anything.
February 4th, 2008 at 10:04 am
“Safer said there is little market today for in-depth coverage of the war in Iraq or other difficult subjects.”
There is little market for news the told the way the liberal ‘progressives’ like it to be told. Just look at the anti-war crowd…despite massive coverage given to a very small group of activists…they can’t manage a proper protest.
February 4th, 2008 at 12:11 pm
Amazing, isn’t it, the nostalgia that old news anchors have for Vietnam?
February 4th, 2008 at 2:16 pm
“People are still trying to puzzle out why we were in Vietnam some 40 odd years later,”
We were in Vietnam because the liberal Democrats decided that we needed to fight communism wherever it reared its ugly head (see the Truman Doctrine and subsequent U.S. policy declarations), leading us to send military advisers and arms to first the French, and then to the South Vietnamese, to help them fight the communists who were trying to take over Vietnam. When that didn’t produce the desired result, we started sending in U.S. combat units to fight the communists. That’s what we were doing in Vietnam.
“We are still puzzling over what we are doing in Iraq.”
We’re in Iraq because the liberal Democrats declared that the defense of Saudi Arabia was vital to the security of the United States way back in 1943. This led the United States to make Saudi Arabia eligible for lend lease assistance (even though they were neutral) and in effect made Saudi Arabia (and the other small states on the Arabian Peninsula) a de facto American protectorate. The basic deal was (and still is) that we defend them and toss them all kinds of U.S. taxpayer dough, and they gave us access to oil. When the Iraqis invaded Kuwait in 1990 that was deemed to be a threat to Saudi Arabia (and also, obviously to Kuwait). We demanded that the Iraqis withdraw, they refused, so we sent in our armed forces to drive them out…and they’ve been there ever since (thanks to the Iraqis refusal to abide by the ceasefire agreement made after we drove them out of Kuwait). That’s mainly what we’re doing in Iraq (note: fighting terrorism is the main issue for people like me…but, it’s obcviously a side issue to the folks who run our government).
That’s the long version. The short version is is that we engage in places like Vietnam and Iraq because we’re carrying out the policies set by liberals…like you.
“We don’t cover the news…”
Obviously not. If you did, you would know why we were in Vietnam then, and why we’re in Iraq now. I’m kidding, of course. No one, not even a journalist, could be so stupid that they could spend years reporting the news and not know why we were in Vietnam and why we’re in Iraq. You’re spewing that “we don’t know why we were there” hogwash because if you told the truth it would reflect negatively on liberals, and it would make it harder for Democrats to get elected to office.
The media’s goal isn’t to report the news, the media’s goal is to push their political agenda (and the media is overwhelmingly liberal and Democrat…so that’s the agenda that gets pushed). The media’s other goal is to make money, and if covering and reporting the news doesn’t serve those ends…they don’t cover and report the news.
February 4th, 2008 at 5:53 pm
“Safer said there is little market today for in-depth coverage of the war in Iraq or other difficult subjects.”
I might believe this to be true if it had been tried and failed, but it hasn’t been tried at all.
And as Jules points out, the reader funded journalists willing to actually go find out what is happening have become quite popular. Tellingly, they are usually the only reporters present unless something “big” is happening, and then the unexpected company is very short lived.