Savannah Morning Embarrassment strikes again

  I was in Gallery Espresso for a meeting today and had couple of minutes to kill. So I reached over and, lo and behold, the top story on the front page of your daily local paper was another mushy valentine to the commanding general of the 3rd Infantry Division, Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, from the resident political stenographer, uh, excuse me, reporter, Larry Peterson.

This one sported the incredibly lame headline, “Lynch: Public will support the war if it is properly informed, but isn’t now.” Reads like a headline The Onion would run, doesn’t it? A middle school newsletter wouldn’t let anything that amateurish hit stands, but there you have it.

In the piece Gen. Lynch specifically and repeatedly blames not bad strategy, not poor planning, not Bush, not Cheney, not Rumsfeld, not Gates, not the Joint Chiefs of Staff, not the Republican Party, not himself — but the media for the disaster in Iraq. It’s really that simple for him.

Got that? The media. He’s a real warfighter, that Lynch is.

Check this out:

“‘If the American people are informed properly,’ Lynch told reporters after he arrived home on leave, ‘I believe they will be supportive of the mission. But they’re not getting the right story. As a result, they’re anti the war.’”

“Anti the war.” That’s evidently what the guy really said. Anti the war.

The grammatically-challenged general goes on to say:

“‘All I’m seeing when I watch TV … is the bad news and not the good news,’ he said.”

Ummm… maybe because we’re in the fifth year of the war with no significant progress and people are really sick and tired of paying for it in the lives of loved ones and in tax dollars? Hmmmmmmm?

Anyway, judging from the direct pipeline Gen. Lynch has to the local daily’s front page — no matter what patronizing, half-baked dittohead slop he’s going to spew on it — Gen. Petraeus has got nothing on him. I mean every word out of Lynch’s mouth, the Morning News splashes all over the place. You can’t pick the damn thing up anymore without seeing some poorly written “column” by Lynch, sometimes placed unethically in the news section (essentially the case with Peterson’s piece, which is basically a thinly disguised column).

I’d be curious as to what the military families the Morning News thinks it’s sucking up to really think of Lynch and the war. I imagine it’s not as glowing a review as the paper seems to think.

It’s passed the point of journalistic malpractice and officially hit the embarrassment stage. I realize the Morning News only has like five or so reporters left after the latest mass exodus/attrition in the newsroom — seriously, I’m not sure they could field a football team at this point — but putting the 3rd ID’s commanding officer on the staff really isn’t the solution.

Here’s Editor & Publisher’s take. It’s not the first time they’ve questioned the ethics of the Morning News on the whole Lynch thing.

As for Larry Peterson, he’s a nice guy. I can only assume too nice to tell his editor and publisher to quit making him write these goofy love letters to the general every other day.

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