“There is a deep anti-military bias in the media, one that begins from the premise that the military must be lying, and that American projection of power around the world must be wrong.”
When former ABC reporter and anchor Terry Moran told me this in an interview in May of 2006, his assertion elicited quite a few nods and not a few objections.
“I think that that is a hangover from Vietnam,” Moran continued at the time, “and I think it’s very dangerous. That’s different from the media doing its job of challenging the exercise of power without fear or favor.”
Moran’s comments caused him some blowback and certainly got the attention of both Left and Right in the Manhattan-Beltway media elite. When Columbia Journalism School Dean and New Yorker staff writer Nicholas Lemann decided to report on me and my program, he used the exchange with Moran as an illustration of how simple questions elicit answers that speak volumes. The above quote was deemed a “money quote” by Lemann. “[B]efore long the blogosphere had worked itself up into a condition of mid-level outrage,” Lemann concluded.
Not for long. Not only was the news cycle already accelerating 20 years ago, but the “era of the blogosphere” was coming to an end. It was fun while it lasted, but its “era” did not survive the pivot the “bigs” made to online platforms. The blogosphere endures in a less influential form, overshadowed by massive online presences of some big operations and by podcasting, but some stalwarts endure, such as Powerline, which crushed Dan Rather in the days when Rather went after the military record of George W. Bush. When Powerline proved that Rather had launched a dud at “W,” it was elevated to Time magazine’s “Blog of the Year,” and for a brief time, the best blogs competed with legacy bylines for importance and influence in the world of news.
While only a handful retain their influence of 20 years ago — “Powerline,” for example, was instrumental in the exposure of the fraud scandal in Minnesota — the enduring impact of the opening of legacy media to independent voices remains real, especially in the area of (1) military conflicts and (2) foreign news.
Two examples of the former: The Institute for the Study of War and the Long War Journal, a project of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
ISW is a nonpartisan, nonprofit, public policy research organization that advances an informed understanding of military affairs through reliable research, trusted analysis, and innovative education. It is simply the best source of detailed information on the Ukraine War to repel Russia’s invasion and, increasingly, the conflict with Iran. While the institute posts to X — Twitter, now X, delivered the death blow to much of the blogosphere — the detailed analyses at ISW make it the preeminent and stable king of the “milblogs” that flourished in the aftermath of 9/11 and the start of the long wars.
The Long War Journal is the other enduring “milblog” that carries on into the era of podcasting, holding its own as a project of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, even as competition arrived. This included individuals like Aaron MacLean, a Marine Corps veteran and Oxford grad who launched the School of War podcast, which grew its audience slowly but surely with serious yet entertaining content. (MacLean was recently signed by CBS as a contributor — a reflection of Bari Weiss’s seriousness of purpose to bring informed content into the news division there.)
The milblogs past and those that remain, as well as podcasts by individuals and experts like MacLean, demonstrate the demand for serious reporting about war, reporting that the general audience does not trust legacy media to deliver.
This past weekend on CNN, Jake Tapper defended the patriotism of reporters. Tapper, a longtime advocate of veterans and “milfamies” and author of one of the best books on America’s war in Afghanistan — The Outpost — had credentials beyond reproach on matters military, but he can’t sprinkle that credibility around. The public has long sensed and internalized what Terry Moran articulated. In questions of American military operations, the public that is informed has never forgotten how wrong legacy media got the “Tet Offensive.”
The distrust of media on matters of war remains as deep among the center-right and conservative public as it has ever been. The clash with Iran is another abyss into which legacy media appears intent on falling.
Combine an anti-military bias with legacy media’s extreme dislike of President Donald Trump, and at least half the country is going to reject narratives about America’s and Israel’s battle with Iran from the jump. Eighteen days into the conflict, and sweeping pronouncements about American “unpreparedness” for the problem of the Strait of Hormuz elicited laughter and disdain. Even the least attentive of Pentagon watchers knew instantly that there were drawers of contingency plans at the Pentagon for dealing with the strait. The reporters who latched on to that particular narrative were exposed as unserious, and legacy media took more incoming over the bias that Moran named and, of course, remains.
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The presence of good reporters on the war is not in dispute. I know a half dozen. Before he took the anchor desk at Fox News, to name just one example, Bret Baier spent years covering the Pentagon. There are others.
But bias remains especially on and within the Left, which cannot separate its political loathing of Trump and his supporters from any story. The extraordinary precision and planning of the American military is again on display. The legacy media has got to find a way to underscore that, despite its hatred of Trump — or the Moran observation will deepen and solidify even more than it has over the past decades.