In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, watch this Irishman named Patrick speak his mind on the current American strategy and presence in Afghanistan and the lack of media coverage of the war:
Kennedy does a more than fair job offering a critique of the American presence in Afghanistan and President Obama’s counterinsurgency/Drone attack strategy. But what has caught the media’s attention about this speech is Kennedy’s attack on the lack of coverage of the war by the MSM, especially in comparison to political scandals, such as Eric Massa’s tickle fights.
While I would like to dump on the media for their lack of Afghanistan coverage, it is much harder to do so today than two years ago, say 2002-2007. Back then Afghanistan took a solid back seat to the war in Iraq and President Bush’s counterterrorism domestic policies. But the media followed candidate and then President Obama’s lead and really started to flood resources toward the Afghan war and the coverage has greatly improved, at least in quantity if not quality. This emphasis shift has really shown that the MSM do indeed take their cues from the present administration to a large degree. After all, Iraq has fallen off of Obama’s public agenda (not to say he has neglected it, just that he rarely talks about it) and for the most part, the media’s too, and it’s not like there’s nothing important going on there.
