I thought I'd heard all the clever ways to sneak opinions into newscasts--but I found a new one while driving home from work tonight.
It was a five-minute evening newscast on a small AM station, from one of those generic radio news networks whose name I don't remember. About three minutes in came a semi-interesting bit of trivia--John Wayne was born 100 years ago today.
A milestone of sorts, yes. Time flies, doesn't it? But I thought to myself--why is this news? Do the 100th birthdays of dead celebrities usually make national news?
Then came the gist of the message.
The newscast cut to a clip from Wayne's 1968 film The Green Berets, considered by many critics to be The Duke's worst movie due to its pro-Vietnam War rhetoric.
"Out here, due process is a bullet," Wayne said, as he gave a cigarette lighter to David Janssen's character and explained that it used to belong to a general who was offed by Charlie.
Back to the newscaster, who noted that Wayne won an Oscar for True Grit before moving on to the next story.
So I thought--why that particular clip? Why not dialogue from True Grit, The Searchers or any one of 50 other films that would have better represented Wayne's career?
I could come to only one conclusion.
Wayne's speech was being used as an editorial comment to support the war in Iraq.
It was a cheap way to sneak a political message into a newscast--not to mention the misuse of a dead person's image to further that message. Wayne might have supported the Iraq war, or not, but he's not here to address that subject.
"Out here, due process is a bullet."
Meanwhile, back in the States, objective media are becoming rarer every day.