What happened to FOX's hoorah?

What happened to FOX's hoorah?


All these years FOX has had the opportunity to really support the men and women in the military and serving as citizen soldiers in the Guards and Reserves. The problem is they didn't support them in the long run.

From the time the talk of the need to invade Iraq made it to the airwaves until the Bush Administration packed up their offices, it was all about showing support for the military operations and not about what was happening to the men and women when they came home. The reports about Afghanistan were forgotten about because Iraq ruled their time but again, it was all about the war itself and not about them.

Walter Reed was not about the deplorable care they suffered from and the enemy became Dana Priest and Anne Hull for daring to report on it. We had an administration disconnected from the wounded created by the two wars some in congress had no problem paying for but found it impossible to find the funds to take care of the wounded. Walter Reed had overworked staff and no one geared up to transform it from heading to be shut down into a fully functional military hospital while two wars were producing more and more men and women needing to be cared for. FOX should have taken the lead and demanded action to take care of the wounded. It was their job as self-proclaimed supporters of the troops.

Homeless veterans were a joke to Bill O'Reilly and the reports of them living in crowded shelters and cardboard boxes became all about drug addicts and criminals instead of veterans left homeless by all administrations before and including Bush's. The support of the troops and the military did not include veterans falling thru the cracks.

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and TBI were not covered as the suicide and attempted suicides went up. To this day there is very little coverage on these two signature wounds of Iraq and Afghanistan.

National Guards and Reservists families living on food stamps and losing their homes were not covered. When they came home without jobs they used to have, no one at FOX seemed to care.

They did an awful lot of shouting about supporting the troops during elections but very little when it really mattered to the men and women they shouted about.

After the invasion of Iraq began, it was full coverage everyday but Afghanistan was forgotten about. Then even the reporting on Iraq dropped down to hardly none at all.

While NATO was screaming for more troops to be sent into Afghanistan to hold off the Taliban, they didn't seem interested.

Now we have the troops coming home from Iraq as the combat operations have ended and hundreds of men and women returning home after handing over combat operations to the Iraqis but FOX does ten minutes. What happened to their hoorah? Is it because the agreement to pull out combat forces by now and all US forces be withdrawn by 2011 was done by President Bush but accomplished under President Obama?

2007 904
2008 314
2009 149
2010 46
Icasualties.org/

When you look at the numbers and the years you'd think that this would be important to mention but FOX didn't seem to be able to connect the dots and really offer a hoorah for what the troops ended up doing in Iraq.

All these years, the loss of life, the wounded, the hardships on the families accomplished Iraq being turned over to the Iraqis without Saddam. Debate all you want about if it was worth it or not but the end results is, the troops did do everything that was asked of them. They didn't lose a single battle. There are 50,000 troops remaining in Iraq but instead of allowing them rejoicing over the pull-out of combat forces, they deserved only ten minutes on FOX. The troops finally heading home deserved coverage but that wouldn't fit into what FOX wanted to talk about.

Because they didn't want to talk about this, they missed the opportunity to really show support for the troops and that is a real shame.

Fox News Covered Iraq Withdrawal For Under TEN MINUTES Wednesday
DAVID BAUDER 08/19/10 11:02 PM
NEW YORK — Nowhere was the difference between the cable news networks on starker display than in prime-time coverage on the night the last American combat brigade left Iraq following a war that started seven years and five months ago.

MSNBC devoted its entire prime-time footprint to the story, with Richard Engel riding with the troops in a specially equipped vehicle and host Rachel Maddow based in Baghdad. Keith Olbermann anchored the coverage from a New York studio.

Fox News Channel devoted just under 10 minutes to the story, much of it during Shepard Smith's 7 p.m. newscast. The network spent 45 minutes discussing the potential construction of an Islamic cultural center near ground zero, while that story wasn't mentioned on MSNBC at all. CNN, meanwhile, spent an hour on each story.

The news decisions led critics of Fox and MSNBC to suggest politics was at play in the coverage decisions.
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Fox News Covered Iraq Withdrawal For Under TEN MINUTES