This Independence Day, I had the privilege of marching with my brethren in the Takoma Park Maryland Fourth of July Parade, helping to carry the banner of our organization. Immediately ahead of us in the procession was a unit of troopers, two riders accompanied by several attendants, all attired in splendid blue cavalry uniforms.
For as long as we marched, this little band of cavalry maintained perfect order and discipline. But when we reached the end of the route, some accident or error caused one of the horses to bolt and gallop through the parade route for many blocks, slightly injuring a bystander and bringing the march to a halt until order was restored.
Local media in the D.C. area reported on the runaway horse. No coverage that I have seen, however, not even in the flagship Washington Post, reported on who exactly had brought the horses to the parade or bothered trying to explain what went wrong.
Sometimes a horse is more than a horse. Although this episode could have produced serious injury both to the horse and to humans, it may seem rather insignificant in the scheme of things. But it is, in fact, worth thinking about if we want to understand why many of us are deeply concerned for the future of our country and its media.
According to the official program, the troopers and their horses came from Troop A of the Maryland Defense Force Cavalry. What I learned about this in the few minutes it took to do a Google search was apparently not of interest to the host of supposed professional journalists who took the time to put out stories on this mishap.
Understand that the Maryland state military was not in the parade just for fun. The troopers were there with their war horses to show off their power and discipline. They marched to demonstrate that danger and to show that their force, like the precision and power of more famous ceremonial units like the U.S. Navy’s Blue Angels, was at the service of our government to be employed for the defense of the country against enemies foreign and domestic.
Unfortunately, due to a few seconds of inattention or some other unspecified accident they failed to control, the Maryland Cavalry displayed the danger more vividly than their discipline. Instead of scaring our enemies, the bolting horse rightly scared us.
We Marylanders don’t know what went wrong, and if we rely on our establishment media, we may never find out who or what was responsible for what went wrong.
The United States rose to paramount power not only because of its continental situation, the attendant population and the resources at its command, but also because our free and uncontrolled press has always been quick to report when something in the raising, training, equipping, or deployment of our military seemed poorly planned or executed, reveling in the opportunity to embarrass the military brass or its civilian overseers. Do they still?
If our military malfunctions on parade, we should be concerned about what worse, even potentially devastating malfunctions will happen when our enemies get a vote on what happens. It is the job of our media, which nobody else can do with the same potential freedom from the influence of party or personal interests, to voice those fears and concerns and help ensure that those we elect adequately address them.
To paraphrase former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, we go to war with the media we have, not the media we want. The media we have defines “professionalism” as sharing and enforcing the opinions prevalent among their colleagues and parroting what progressives in power tell them rather than enforcing the old standards and tools of professional journalism.
Too many in our media choose to help those in power police voters from voting “wrong” instead of being the first to ask “who, what, when, where, and how” when something goes wrong.
This leaves us blind to the dangers our enemies pose as well as the dangers of the inadequately controlled, trained, and equipped forces we have in place to confront our enemies if that should be required. It is not just the White House press corps that has seemingly forgotten how to afflict the powerful in order to comfort the afflicted; it’s all of our mainstream press. Whether the disaster is minor or serious, the press should be there to make sure lessons will be learned and the sufferings occasioned by a disaster will not be proved vain.
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