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• Monday, January 12, 2009 08:26 AM

  And yet, you know this is going to go over big with the same people who think Fox News really reports "news."

  I'll offer my advice as if this was a person worth having a discussion with, because others here may find themselves in that position with their in-laws or co-workers or whoever.

  When people say that wartime reporting should be abolished in the interests of the war effort, I always think "Yeah, that worked real well for the Japanese and the Germans!" The German magazine "Signal" had photospreads and acrtoons and "fair and balanced coverage" of how well the German war effort was going right up until the Americans were crossing the Rhine and the Russians were massacring (perhaps I should say "countermassacring" or is that too Orwellian?) civilians in Prussia. Saburo Sakai, the Japanese ace, told in his autobiography "Samurai" how Japanese authorities trumpeted victory after victory until the American forces invaded the Marianas. Then, as he said, people across Japan opened their atlases and looked at globes and wondered how they could be defending teh Marianas if, as the government had told them, the Ameican fleets had been sunk.

  Samuel Joel Wurzelbacher, if you're going to cite World War II as an example, you should remember that the anti-Roosevelt press kept up a steady drumbeat that the war was being bungled. Bill Mauldin said German propaganda leaflets regularly quoted the very Republican Chicago Tribune.

  —MAV in Florida Read MAV in Florida's other letters
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