Political grandstanding does not serve veterans

Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
May 7, 2014

When Jon Stewart of Comedy Central's Daily Show does a better job reporting on veterans than ABC, CBS, CNN, FOX, and NBC combined, it pretty much summed up why veterans no longer trust the news they hear. The Daily Show managed to bring all of this to one very important segment on what has been going on with veterans as they told the story of Vietnam veterans. All of this has been going on that long.

CBS seems to have forgotten this on veterans committing suicide

Many times during the hearing, both legislators and VA officials stated that "the exact numbers should not matter" in a discussion of veteran suicide; that one suicide is one too many. Still, a lot of time was spent arguing over just how prevalent the problem is.

The hearing was prompted in part by a CBS news story in November on suicides in the veteran population that put last year’s number of veteran suicides at over 6,000. VA officials refuted that number, questioning its validity. But a VA Inspector General report released in May of 2007 found that as many as 5,000 veterans commit suicide a year—nearly 1,000 of whom are receiving VA care at the time.

That piece of news came out in 2007.

The backlog of claims has been going on since Vietnam veterans came home and as a matter of fact, look up any decade of claims to see who was waiting and for how long.

People were calling for VA secretaries to resign over and over again but Congress wants people to forget what happened and the giant heads of national news follow right along as if all of this is new. Hey, why should facts matter? Why would they want to tell us how long this has been going on and never got fixed because they moved on to something else while veterans were left behind.

Ok, so now it seems everyone is screaming for Eric K. Shinseki to go even though things are a lot better now than it has been. Is it perfect? Hell no! But how about actually fixing what needs to be fixed for once and for all veterans so veterans don't have to suffer more because the talking heads want to make a headline instead of making sense?

If you are a reporter and want to know what else has been reported wrong, feel free to use the search at the top of the blog and find it yourself. After all, everything here comes from other news reporters!