The story began when a letter from Lt. Brian Bradshaw's aunt was published the Washington Post:
A day before New York Rep. Peter King called Michael Jackson a “pervert” unworthy of nonstop media coverage, the aunt of a U.S. soldier killed in Afghanistan on the same day Jackson died asked why her nephew's death went virtually unnoticed while the King of Pop got memorial shrines across the country.
"Mr. Jackson received days of wall-to-wall coverage in the media," Martha Gillis wrote to the Washington Post. "Where was the coverage of my nephew or the other soldiers who died that week?"
While Bradshaw's death, and the death's of others on the field of battle are more worthy of coverage, the hypocrisy of Fox"News" is astounding in its own right.
The media, regardless of who they are, are focused on ad revenue and what "consumers" ( read: viewers ) want. This isn't about what MSNBC, CBS, or ABC wants, it's what the people that buy the ad time are wanting - eyes and ears glues to televisions and asses posted on couches. The same holds true of Fox. The advertisers don't care what O'Reilly says as long as he pulls in the numbers. Of course, there is a line that can be ( and has been ) crossed where the advertisers will step in, but when you pull in 31 millions people for a memorial service, then that's dollar signs in the eyes of ad execs.
Fox takes the same approach to the entire military, regardless if you are dead or alive. It's war-porn for the right-wing realm. But don't let the blathering masses at Fox fool you, they weren't always concerned with the deaths of individual soldiers:
Conservatives and Fox"News" are acting like media outlets have never reported on the deaths in Iraq and Afganistan. If you will recall, it hasn't been that long ago the these same people were lambasting the other networks for covering the death tolls in both conflicts and claiming that their coverage is entirely negative because it focused so much on the death-toll.
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