I did not communicate well.

I do not condone "truthiness" because it, as you well stated, shades the issue.

I saw a lot of crappy stuff in 6+ years… but the number of great men and women doing good things far surpassed it… to the point that much of the crappiness was diluted away… although the actions of "leadership" is a slightly different story.

"Truthiness" is a journalistic lie to give credibility to a viewpoint which is trying to be sold.

Strangely, it the opposite, yet has the same purpose as Stars & Stripes reporting which manages to sell a viewpoint by exactly reporting the facts… but in such a way that they never report the story.

It is a lie. Both technically and journalistic.

Like in the Stephen Glass piece, you can also say that there are surely young Republicans on college campus who are just as big asses as Glass reports meeting in one day at that conference.

Without a doubt, it is true some of the young republicans do drugs, have casual sex in the restrooms of a hotel or public place and abuse women.

You can say the same about any sizable organization of people.

But, to jam pack all that "truth" into a fictitious narrative supposedly covering one day of experience — what do you get?

What the author desired, a false picture damning the group targeted. A demonization. Not just a stretching of the truth.

The Heldman article is wall-to-wall gore for USFK. 14 pages of absolutely nothing but a bunch of assholes and criminals.

Does that match your conclusion after 6+ years experience?

That is why this article is a big fat lie and fraud.

It it were the truth, everyday in the service in USFK and every night on the town would be a huge cesspool surrounding a broken organization in desperate need of fundamental reform.

And that is how the kind of people who read Zmag think of the US military and the military in general.

And whatever grains of truth they might point to to justify their grossly exaggerated opinion, they are still wrong. Not "mostly right but just a little off."

Heldman's article does not pass the smell test.

On one hand, I believe he is absolutely correct in everything he wrote…

…because I saw almost all of that first-hand.

On the other, it took me about 6 years of living in the middle of it to get the same picture.

Did it all happen? I'm sure.

Did it all happen to him all around the same time? Proably not.

This is the essence of "truthiness" in reporting.

That's all.

I was wrong about the Boston Globe — the female reporter who wrote the powerful firsthand experience lies about the young drug addict worked for the Washington Post…

if I remember correctly — in the parts that talk about Helman's career that I took from one or two websites I link there —

— I seem to remember that two of the stories that didn't get published by orgs that led to him breaking with them (and/or them him) had something in common: Both were articles about his own personal experience — personal experience carried out in an "investigative journalism" effort — which happened to take place overseas — far from the prying eyes of editors…

I'll have to check that later…

It isn't much evidence — I admit that fully and restate it — it isn't much evidence —- but it is curious if my memory is serving correct:

What a better way to write a really graphic, powerful piece — where you make up and/or grossly exaggerate what you actually do experience –

than by going over the seas and in at least in the Korea case halfway around the world — to do it?

How many editors are going to bust a gut trying to track down the people you interviewed?

When you're writing about street people or gang members in the US military, how easy is it going to be to track them down and get them to speak frankly to an editor or fact checker in the first place?

I would think an editor would force the reporter to give him the real names of the soldiers and would expect the reporter to have written down the real names and maybe contact information in his notes…but who knows….

And that is why these famous liars in the media chose to go for the big headlines by writing such powerful pieces by using firsthand accounts of people that would be hard to track down.

If Glass or that woman for the Boston Globe, I believe it was, had not been too good at what they were doing, if they had not become so popular with their stories, nobody would have gone to the considerable trouble of trying to track down so many fictional people to do follow up stories.

We can add the Nogunri AP piece to this list as well: There the journalists didn't come out and tell bold faced lies, but they were all too happy to quote extensively with powerful quotes from a couple of people who should have been easily verifiable as liars based on their military records…

People naturally believe firsthand accounts add credibility in a news article. I think we've seen that proven abused enough to doubt it somewhat.

Go back to the article and read it.

Then read some of the articles about Stephen Glass here: http://www.rickmcginnis.com/articles/Glassindex.h…

You can't access the actual Glass articles unless you have Lexus Nexus access because the New Republic scrubbed them from the Internet.

But, the worst of Glass's many fictions read exactly like this Heldman piece – and like the Beauchamps pieces and like that female reporter in the 1980s who made up the stories about the drug addicted little kid.

They use "firsthand" "person to person" encounters to paint a powerful narrative — and one that is hard to pin down or track down.

And the real tell-tale sign is how they can't seem to stop themselves once the tall-tale narrative gets their juices flowing: their "news" stories become narratives with wall-to-wall stereotypical encounters with stereotypical people…

…that is why some of the liberal journalists writing after the Glass story broke said they couldn't believe, in hindsight, how they fell for all those outrageous articles.

Heldman's reads exactly the same. Exactly.

I have zero doubt USFK has a problem with alcoholism. I have no doubt it has problems with racism and gangs. I have no doubt it has people in it who loath the military. Pick pretty much any single factual category Heldman explorers in the piece, and I'd say I agree pretty much completely that it is a legitimate category and area for discussion about USFK in Korean society.

But, throw them all together in one short trip to Korea in such a nice, neat little package that fits an absolutely perfect narrative for this reporter?

No way. Not a chance.

I don't see how any other reasonable person reading the entire piece could do anything but come away thinking it must be largely made up.

….and he can say Rolling Stone (and others) turned it down because it was too dark or to anti-military or whatever….

….but my instinct tells me a lot of editors probably had the very same misgivings about it I had reading it…

……of which of course Noam Chompsky wouldn't…..

The 1%ers have infiltrated plenty of places, and the military is just one of the institutions they have people in.

I'm also not going to deny that he saw and reported what he saw in Itaewon- but anything an Itaewon wench says is usually twisted to her benefit. These people are not "honest whores" we met 3 decades ago- they are professional grifters, some not very smart, but they still are able to use truth as a commodity.

And the losers he met- well, if you go out to loser places, again, you aren't going to meet America's best and brightest.

That said, he should have seen the place about 20 years BEFORE he got there! It was…it was…well, a HELL of a lot of fun for a 19 year old kid from the country coming down from Up North in Seriousland.