It was the worst news-listening day of my life. The news wasn’t all bad. The news was half-bad. That was the problem.
Hold that conundrum in gentle orbit around the airport. We’ll land with it shortly.
In the days of Tito’s Communist Yugoslavia, I was a boy reporter opening up my precocious pores and soaking in all the Cold War politics my juvenile mind could contain. I toured Yugoslavia with a British reporter and, on a train in what is now Croatia, a local woman, upon learning my colleague was British, actually started crying, hugged him and said, “Thank you for those BBC reports during the war!” She even mentioned the names of the BBC’s Serbo-Croatian-speaking commentators she admired so much. “You told the truth,” she gushed. “You British were the only ones who told the truth. Everybody else lied. England told the truth!”
Indeed, “telling the truth” may have been Britain’s greatest military move of the entire war. God knows their surrender to Japanese Gen. Yamashita at Singapore, when the Brits outnumbered the Japanese three to one, was not! In wartime governments lie. The Germans and the Russians were the worst. And nobody believed them. It was tough for England to tell the truth early in the war. “Hitler is running all over us!” “France is helpless, hapless and hopeless!” “How many British troops can we get off the beach at the French resort of Dunkirk safely back to the home island?” Nonetheless, England told the truth.
And when the tide of battle turned in favor of our side, those captive peoples of Europe believed the good news. The British radio reports turned tired blood into sparkling burgundy and rallied the anti-Nazi underground warriors like an intravenous shot of a powerful stimulant with no bad side effects.
Last Saturday morning the news on TV sounded great! The Americans had intensified airstrikes against ISIS positions, enabling the Kurdish defenders of Kobani to hold their ground and even re-take valuable territory from ISIS. Greg Palkot of Fox News pointedly said something like, “The American airstrikes have definitely worked to help the Kurds tighten their defenses against the ISIS forces.” The ice of validity gets thin and precarious when you try to build a castle on a reporter’s tone of voice, but I thought I was hearing Palkot saying, “The Obama administration wins this argument, folks. The airstrike campaign was ridiculed as being pitifully inadequate. I’m here and I can see it. The airstrikes are working!”
There are anti-Obama Americans who despise conceding one single acorn in a forest of oak trees if doing so might comfort the Obama White House. That’s not my wing of the party. I’m an anti-Obama American who wants the truth and will offer an ungrudging high-five to the Obama regime in the unlikely event that they earn it. And, at last, if the airstrikes are indeed successful, they finally may have.
But hold the line. That wasn’t the end of the newscast. There followed a volley of return fire from a retired high-ranking American officer, who stormed out against the airstrikes and against any notion that they’re working, that they’re effective, and that we may not need American boots-on-the-ground after all. The officer went further, alleging that any suggestion that airstrikes are working could have a devastating effect by giving the American people a warped impression of military reality in the Middle East.
My news-listening life began with Hitler’s takeover of Austria in 1938. Except for some catastrophic warpage during the Vietnam era, particularly the one about the Viet Cong winning the Tet Offensive, we had no difficulty trusting the veracity of American news. While not quite up to British standards, we knew what a catastrophe Pearl Harbor was, how the western Pacific became a Japanese lake, how we began the long road back with our takeover of Guadalcanal and the dozens of Japanese-held islands that followed, the game-changing victory at Midway and eventually the atomic finale.
Are we now destined to sit here in 2014 and wonder which politically inspired version of the news comes closest to the truth? When we belt out what we wish over what we know, we’re coming perilously close to saying, “I’d like to tell you the truth about airstrikes but, dammit, my ego is on the line!”
It didn’t take much courage for Greg Palkot to tell us the airstrikes seemed to be working. It took tons of courage for him to add that “tone of voice” I heard.
Did you know that when Japanese Emperor Hirohito told the Japanese people on radio that Japan had surrendered, the term, “We lost” was never uttered? Nor anything close. The emperor simply told his people, “The war has progressed in a fashion not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.”
But Hitler’s favorite broadcaster did Hirohito even one better. In October 1942, the British Eighth Army handed Germany’s Gen. Erwin Rommel a defeat so shattering that it pitched the Germans into the longest, fastest retreat in military history. “Retreat”? “Defeat”? Nothing of the kind from Ludwig Sertorius on Nazi German radio.
The word from Berlin was: “All British attempts to interfere with our orderly advance to the rear have been successfully smashed!”
Media wishing to interview Barry Farber, please contact [email protected].
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