Mainstream media accountable to no one

Mainstream media accountable to no one
by Kathie Costos
Wounded Times Blog
February 5, 2013

The only time mainstream media mentions PTSD or our veterans, it follows a terrible story like what happened to Chris Kyle. Where were they all these years? They have been too busy reporting on President Obama skeet shooting and Beyonce.

In 2008 I was about as angry as I thought I could be. I was wrong. Five years later as military and veteran suicides have gone up, I sit here everyday, post their stories and wonder why people pay good money to support mainstream media.

Mainstream media
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Mainstream media (MSM) are those media disseminated via the largest distribution channels, which therefore represent what the majority of media consumers are likely to encounter. The term also denotes those media generally reflective of the prevailing currents of thought, influence, or activity.

Large news conglomerates, including newspapers and broadcast media, which underwent successive mergers in the U.S. and elsewhere at an increasing rate beginning in the 1990s, are often referenced by the term. This concentration of media ownership has raised concerns of a homogenization of viewpoints presented to news consumers. Consequently, the term mainstream media has been widely used in conversation and the blogosphere, often in oppositional, pejorative, or dismissive senses, in discussion of the mass media and media bias.

Media organizations such as CBS and the New York Times set the tone for other smaller news organizations by creating conversations which cascade down to the smaller news organizations lacking the resources to do more individual research and coverage, that primary method being through the Associated Press where many news organizations get their news. This results in a recycling effect wherein organic thought is left to the mainstream that choose the conversation and smaller organizations recite absent of a variance in perspective.

In 2001 when I finished my book For the Love of Jack, I was stupid enough to think that if people knew what I knew, then they would demand change for the sake of the men and women serving in Afghanistan. The troops were not in Iraq yet. If they got their act together they would have trauma specialists deployed with the troops to address what they went through and prevent the majority of PTSD cases, thereby preventing many of the suicides connected to PTSD.

Civilians had been doing that across the country when major traumatic events happen including the attacks of September 11 when specialists rushed into New York and Washington DC.

When I watch TV news, I am stunned by how little the "reporters" actually know about PTSD. They don't seem to understand there is a huge difference between the type of PTSD civilians get and the type of PTSD members of the military suffer from anymore than they seem to understand that just because the term is new to them, it has been studied for over 40 years and reported under different titles since wars began. Hell, it is even in the Bible!

So I sit here this morning while thinking about last night and how the coverage suddenly spread over all the mainstream media outlets since Chris Kyle and Chad Littlefield were murdered at a gun range while trying to help a PTSD veteran.

Veteran in sniper killing talked of having PTSD
By Angela K. Brown and Jamie Stengle
The Associated Press
Posted : Monday Feb 4, 2013

FORT WORTH, Texas — The Iraq war veteran and Marine reservist charged with killing a former Navy SEAL sniper and his friend on a Texas shooting range had been taken to a mental hospital twice in the past five months and told authorities he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, police records show.

Cpl. Eddie Ray Routh, 25, also told his sister and brother-in-law after the shootings that he “traded his soul for a new truck,” according to an Erath County arrest warrant affidavit obtained by WFAA-TV. Police said Routh was driving the truck of victim and ex-Navy SEAL Chris Kyle at the time of his arrest.

Routh is charged with one count of capital murder and two counts of murder in the shooting deaths of Kyle, author of the best-selling book “American Sniper,” and his friend Chad Littlefield at a shooting range Saturday in Glen Rose. He is on suicide watch in the Erath County Jail, where he’s being held on $3 million bail, Sheriff Tommy Bryant said.

Routh, a member of the Individual Ready Reserve, was first taken to a mental hospital Sept. 2 after he threatened to kill his family and himself, according to police records in Lancaster, where Routh lives. Authorities found Routh walking nearby with no shirt and no shoes, and smelling of alcohol. Routh told authorities he was a Marine veteran who was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.

Routh was a "danger to himself and others" but as we've seen, he did not get the help he needed. Yet none of this has caused mainstream reporters to learn enough to ask how this is still happening. Still? Yes, it has been happening for far too long when they are left off the "to do" list of the military. Congress gets away without asking anyone to be held accountable because the mainstream media is no longer interested in informing the public. Read this from 2009 and know that for all of these years of hearing speech after speech given to reporters, it has all left us with veterans being shafted to the point where almost one every hour takes their own lives. How many times does this have to happen before the media decides it is their job to keep the public informed?

"He went to Fort Lewis to kill himself to prove a point,"
January 12, 2009


" 'Here I am. I was a soldier. You guys didn't help me.' "

Those were the words Josh Barber's widow told a reporter in the article below. That's the real issue here. For all the talk about what's being done, no one is talking about what does not work and may in fact cause more harm than good. What good does it do to tell wounded veterans we're doing this and we're doing that but they still don't get the help they need? As for the "programs" they have in place, some are good but some are bad but they still use them. We don't know why they do and the widows, well they only know they sent their husbands into combat expecting they would be taken care of if they were wounded but they end up with a stranger needing help that never seems to come in time.

If anyone other than the government said they had a program that would cut down the number of PTSD cases, attempted suicide and successful ones, would you really believe them without proof? Wouldn't there have to be years of clinical trails and scrutiny from psychologist and psychiatrists from around the world before they even began to offer the program?

Had they paid attention to all of this all along, when Routh came home, he would have been helped the way he needed to be and two others would probably still be alive.