Op-ed: Media doing job by questioning official actions
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The recent collapse of the Afghanistan government and army, and the takeover by the Taliban, are being blamed on a lot of people.
One of the main targets of that criticism is President Joe Biden. He can certainly be criticized for a less-than-perfect removal of all Americans (who want to leave) and all of the Afghan citizens who feel endangered by the takeover by the very forces they were trying to defeat, by helping the U.S. and other countries sort out their country's internal mess.
It should be noted here that thousands of Afghan citizens leave that country each year by crossing borders into neighboring countries. That has been going on for many years.
Even a spokesman for the Taliban agreed. Dr. Suhail Shaheen recently said, "Seventy percent of the people in Afghanistan live under the line of poverty so everyone wants to resettle in Western countries to have a prosperous life." Of course, he said that in an effort to explain why so many Afghanis are desperate to escape, rather than out of fear of reprisal from the Taliban.
Even if the U.S. and other nations had started airlifting people who wanted to leave Afghanistan a YEAR ago, they could not have transported everyone who wanted to leave. And of course, all of those refugees from Afghanistan would face challenges in their adopted homes, too.
There are some voices in America already objecting to bringing some of those refugees here, even if they have passed stringent security screenings. It reminds me of the shipload of Jewish refugees from Europe who attempted to land in America in 1939, in advance of the Nazis, and was TURNED AWAY. America often sympathizes with people it has no intention of actually helping...
But back to the criticism of President Joe Biden in all of this.
It is often said that the "main stream media" (which President Trump liked to call the "lame stream media") are less critical of Democratic presidents than Republican ones. I have not done any empirical research on this but am prepared to admit that could be the case...in some cases.
But it has been interesting in the past couple of weeks to see all of the "liberal" media pile on President Biden.
The major TV networks, CNN, The New York Times, and others have all run or published stories which are critical of the way this has been handled. Some "liberal" newspapers have run opinion pieces, taking the Biden Administration to task.
Which is all as it should be!
We often hear that the reason why "conservative" media has risen over the past few years, is because the "liberal" media was serving as a mouthpiece for liberal politicians, particularly Democratic presidents.
But the criticism that Mr. Biden and his team have received due to the situation in Afghanistan is proof that the so-called liberal media can and does sock it to Democratic Presidents.
I would be hard-pressed to believe that FOX News would be taking President Trump to task had he been presiding over anything like what's going on in Afghanistan. They didn't do so when he deserted the Kurds in Syria in 2018. They didn't do so when he decided to negotiate with the Taliban, set a May 2021 date for withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Afghanistan, and then drew down troop levels from 4,500 to 2,500 with virtually no notice, right before he left office.
I am reminded of a high school student I met in the early 1990s when he was touring WTAP-TV. This was during the administration of President George H.W. Bush. He asked me, "Why is the press so much tougher on Republican presidents than it is on Democratic ones?" Knowing his approximate age, I determined that the Reagan and Bush administrations (Jan. 1981- Jan. 1993) were really the first ones he had ever known. I told him, "I have to disagree. Just wait until a Democrat gets elected President! You'll see the media go after that President, too!"
Sure enough, Democrat Bill Clinton was elected and became only the second President in American history to ever be impeached. And the so-called "liberal" news media was there reporting every sordid detail along the way.
I would not argue against those who say that journalists are human and may bring their own histories and biases to their work. But I know that most editors work to keep those biases out of their reportage. And most editors prefer to keep editorializing to the editorial pages.
It will never be perfect. Nothing ever is. But we are seeing media of all stripes questioning and, yes, even criticizing, the Biden Administration for what's going on today in Afghanistan. That's OK.
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Roger Sheppard is the former VP/GM of TheNewsCenter, which operates the local TV stations in the Mid-Ohio Valley. He also worked at The Parkersburg News, The Charleston Daily Mail, KDKA-TV in Pittsburgh, and WOWK-TV in Huntington.