THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

Reporters are getting killed a lot these days. CNN had a special on this rising death rate a short time ago. Even more recently CNN announced that another of their producers had been killed.

This is not completely new. Bill Mauldin, the famous World War II cartoonist, was killed at the front at the end of that war.

A foreign reporter was killed when the United States Army enforced integration at the University of Mississippi on the orders of President Kennedy in 1962.

But recently the death rate among reporters has risen substantially. The Liberated Peoples, the people we right wingers said shouldn't be running countries, are now murdering reporters in record numbers. Their leaders, the people us reactionaries said were a bunch of mindless thugs, are suppressing reporters all over the world, and jailing them, and killing them.

During all those years we were warning against these "emerging" leaders, the media championed those folks. They were leftists, and the media championed anybody on the left.

Back during World War II, the enemy was right wing, so the press was solidly on the side of the United States. That seemed an obvious side for them to take, since the fascist enemy was against freedom of the press.

But we have been told, over and over, that things got "complicated" after World War II. We are told, again and again, that the enemy was no longer nearly so clear and obvious.

TRANSLATION

Suddenly, the enemy of the United States was now on the political LEFT.

The media could not come down so hard or so clearly against the Communists as they had upon the fascists.

They tell us that all the time, though they don't use those words. They just say, "After World War II, things were no longer so simple. It was harder to tell the good guys from the bad guys."

Hitler was bad. But Stalin was "complicated."

The post-World War II Communist enemy was just as solidly against freedom of the press as any fascist. All that had changed was that this enemy was on the left. That is the only reason things were suddenly so "complicated."

Exactly the same thing happened with the trendy attitude toward the atomic bomb. When it was to be used against Nazi Germany, everybody from Einstein to Oppenheimer to Fuchs was all for it, no problem. By the time Germany surrendered, the momentum was there, and it was used against Japan.

Then, suddenly, Communism rather than fascism was the enemy. Suddenly, the atomic bomb was Evil.

Once again, the media makes no secret of this.

Recently I was watching a show about Oppenheimer, a scientist who helped develop the atomic bomb during World War II. He switched to opposing the US having the bomb when Communism became the enemy. He was especially friendly to the Communists, and many people suspected that he gave Stalin atomic secrets. There is no doubt that his fellow scientist, Klaus Fuchs, was in fact a Communist and did give Stalin nuclear secrets, so there was nothing impossible about this suspicion. Naturally, this program, like all of them, was dedicated to proving that Oppenheimer did not give secrets to Stalin. To demonstrate how he resisted the temptation to give atomic secrets to the Reds, it showed Oppenheimer at a party in his home, being urged by his Communist friends to give secrets to Stalin.

In order to show how patriotic Oppenheimer was, Oppenheimer was represented as refusing to yield to his Communist friends' open incitements to treason. To the people producing the show, resisting your Communist friends' demands that you commit treason shows you are a true patriot.

I am a fellow from rural South Carolina, so this struck me in an absolutely different way than it did anybody who makes television shows.

My first reaction was to wonder what in the hell a man with a top secret clearance was doing LISTENING TO somebody who was urging him to commit treason?

Well, to the media, this was not so "simple." This was a very "complicated" matter. These were Communist friends, not fascists.

Translation: it's not treason, it's leftism.

I am not joking here. This is how our real national dialogue is determined.

It is just that no one dares put it in plain English. Any respectable conservative who put it this way would quickly cease to be respectable.

And all this is the policy of the American press. They sanction enemies of freedom of the press, provided those enemies are on the left. And, in the world they have created, a lot of media people get killed.

As a South Carolina boy who has no reverence at all, I am not that upset that the media is getting what it gave the rest of us. They have never shown any outrage when Americans were killed or betrayed by their pets on the political left.

When the third world masses and their thugs took over and suppressed freedom and killed people and seized American property, the media said that was just fine. But now that they are killing media people, too, it is suddenly horrible and disastrous.

Or it may be simply a case of what goes around comes around.