Just when you think the mainstream media will not be able to plumb deeper depths in their attempts to attack America and its values, they prove you wrong again.
Boston Globe columnist James Carroll wrote a piece that the the Globe’s website published around midnight on February 11th using the death of American hero Chris Kyle to attempt to score political points against the U.S. military and drones. Carroll so completely botched the basic facts in his column “Death comes out of nowhere” in just the first paragraph that his column deserves special mention. His screed begins:
AS CHRIS Kyle, author of the book “American Sniper,” was laid to rest last week, the sad glow of a lost hero’s aura surrounded his passing. In light of his generous effort to help a deranged fellow veteran who is now accused of murdering him, the burial honors seemed especially fitting. And yet the obituaries and remembrances were universally striking for the way they avoided what had made him famous. As a Navy SEAL, Kyle had been a professional killer, described in the subtitle of his autobiography as the “most lethal sniper in US military history.”
Let’s start with Carroll’s most basic disrespect for the late Chris Kyle; he couldn’t even be bothered to figure out when Kyle was buried. Carroll claims Kyle was “laid to rest last week” when, at the time of publication, Chris Kyle had not been buried yet. Kyle’s planned memorial and burial weren’t due to take until hours after the Globe column came out. It doesn’t end there, either.
The entire premise of the article is that Kyle’s background as a sniper has been glossed over. Carroll claims “the obituaries and remembrances were universally striking for the way they avoided what had made him famous,” namely his role as a sniper.
It is a lie to claim that the media avoided discussing Kyle’s role as a sniper, and it’s a damn lie to say that it was somehow “universally striking.” A quick Google search will put this false premise to bed immediately. Let’s just look at the lead paragraphs of stories by three top sources.
The New York Times headline on Kyle’s murder was “Untouchable in Iraq, Ex-Sniper Dies in a Shooting Back Home,” and it began:
From his perch in hide-outs above battle-scarred Iraq, Chris Kyle earned a reputation as one of America’s deadliest military snipers. The Pentagon said his skills with a rifle so terrorized Iraqi insurgents during his four tours of duty that they nicknamed him the “Devil of Ramadi” and put a bounty on his head.
The Washington Post report was titled “Chris Kyle, Navy SEAL and author of ‘American Sniper,’ dies,” and it began with the paragraphs:
He said he killed 160 people, perhaps many more, making him one of the leading U.S. military snipers of all time. In the course of four combat deployments to Iraq, he said insurgents nicknamed him “the devil of Ramadi” and placed a $20,000 bounty on his head.
“After the first kill, the others come easy,” Chris Kyle wrote last year in his best-selling memoir of Iraqi war service with the elite Navy SEALs. “I don’t have to psych myself up, or do something special mentally — I look through the scope, get my target in the cross hairs, and kill my enemy, before he kills one of my people.”
In a career mostly lived by the gun, Mr. Kyle’s death at 38 was nonetheless shocking.
USA Today‘s piece was headlined “Ex-SEAL Chris Kyle remembered after shooting death,” and the subhead read: “Chris Kyle wrote the best-selling book ‘American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History.'”
The article opens with:
Investigators in Texas Sunday were trying to piece together what led to the shooting deaths a day earlier of American Sniper author Chris Kyle and another man at a gun range in Glen Rose, about 50 miles southwest of Fort Worth.
There was clearly no attempt whatsoever to gloss over Kyle’s career as a sniper or, as Carroll calls it, “what made him famous.” In fact, if anything, the use of the phrase “a career mostly lived by the gun” by the Washington Post shows how the media was eager to seize on Kyle’s death in the midst of the gun control debate. Everyone discussed Kyle’s role as a sniper.
This should undercut Carroll’s entire premise. No matter. He plows along anyway, eager to score a point, no matter how many facts he’s mangled about an American hero to get it. Carroll’s piece shows a complete distain for Kyle before eventually getting to what seems to be his actual point; he doesn’t like drones:
Now the United States military, along with its CIA paramilitary, is moving into the age of the automated sniper — the armed drone. The public reticence that inhibited discussion of the actual meaning of Kyle’s history pales beside the silence with which the nation — government, media, citizenry — treats the moral threshold of assassination by drone. Death out of nowhere, inflicted by unthreatened operators, upon designated enemies, who may or may not pose lethal threats, and who may or may not be as guilty as the joystick judges decide. America has become a sniper nation.
The column’s shocking lack of consideration for not just Kyle and his family but for all of the Boston Globe‘s readers is unfortunately not at all shocking to anyone familiar with the tactics of today’s media. They see themselves as the keepers of the narrative, and truth is the constant casualty.
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