CNN scolded on live TV for 'over-the-top' Afghanistan coverage: '5,000 people died of Covid in this

[BumRushDaShow]

45. Two things that stood out to me

(and except for a couple "big news" events over the past year and this was NOT one of them, I have not had the cable TV news on)

The first was the scramble by the media outlets to find a still shot of a helicopter hovering over a building to manufacture a comparison of the evacuation of Kabul to the evacuation of Saigon.

For example, this nonsense -



Once they made that comparison, then they completely blanked out the 2021 "reality" and internalized the "Kabul = Vietnam" meme, and have been running with it, shoe-horning all kinds of nonsense into what they believe is happening with Afghanistan. It's literally like they are brainwashed and are viewing something completely off.

It reminds me of the early scenes of the film "The Manchurian Candidate" and how the captured U.S. soldiers were brainwashed, with the scenes flipping between them sitting in a row facing an audience of Chinese soldiers and what their brains were actually "programmed" to see - an audience of older women who had come to hear a lecture on hydrangeas.

And the second was the realization that there are many of these "foreign correspondents" who have literally made a career - because this has gone on for 20 years - out of reporting from Afghanistan. Many had already "lost" their reporting duties from Iraq when that was pretty much wound down, and now they are finding themselves SOL with nowhere to go, and were apparently caught off guard at the suddenness of the conclusion of what has been a never-ending military engagement.

So it's like they are now playing out, live on TV, their stages of grief, where they are lashing out at what they believe is the cause of what will be a loss of their jobs. Their selfishness and immaturity tarnishes the whole point of their occupation. I.e., Dan Rather, who was a reporter in Vietnam, didn't have a meltdown when that war was finally concluded.



In the past - pre-2000s - the media used to hold annual (and sometimes more frequent) panel discussions akin to what would later be dubbed "Lessons Learned" exercises, to evaluate their coverage of certain stories. It seems they have stopped doing this.