July 3, 2004
AN INTERNET RUMOR THEY'RE HAPPY TO RUN WITH:
Military Draft? Official Denials Leave Skeptics: Talk of reinstating the military draft persists, driven by the Internet and high-profile moves by the military to shore up its forces. (CARL HULSE, 7/03/04, NY Times)
[T]alk of reinstating the military draft persists around the country, driven by the Internet, high-profile moves by the military to shore up its forces and fears that all those solid reassurances about no need for conscription could quickly melt away if world events took a turn for the worse."The mood of, if not the country but a significant plurality of the country, is highly skeptical," said the founder of StopTheDraft.com, Barry Zellen, who has seen traffic to his site jump in recent months. "If the world spun madly out of control, where would they get the boots on the ground?"
Congressional aides say their offices receive a steady stream of telephone calls and e-mail messages inquiring about the status of the draft. Lawmakers themselves are regularly asked if Congress is preparing to re-establish the system, abolished by President Richard M. Nixon 31 years ago.
"Everyone says, `We've got young children, and we don't want them in the draft,' " said Bill Ghent, a spokesman for Senator Thomas R. Carper, Democrat of Delaware.
At the offices of the Selective Service System, which in 1980 resumed registering men at age 18 in the event the draft was ever resurrected, inquiries arrive daily along with a barrage of requests from news organizations for interviews about the idea of restoring mandatory military service.
"People think it is some big government conspiracy," said Harald Stavenas, a spokesman for the House Armed Services Committee, which gets its share of draft questions as well.
But top lawmakers, joined by Pentagon leaders and administration officials, say that there are definitely no plans to resume the draft and that the military is much better off relying on a substantially motivated volunteer force rather than on conscripts.
For the most part conservatives just have to accept that the media is biased and won't report stories even-handedly and then just get over it. But this seems to be a pretty clear case of the press stoking a non-story because they know it hurts the President.
MORE:
Researchers surprised by liberal bias of media (Linda Seebach, July 3, 2004, Rocky Mountain News)
People trying to persuade others to adopt their views are very likely to cite think-tank experts who agree with them. And the liberal lobbying group Americans for Democratic Action (their description of themselves) regularly grades politicians from 0 to 100 based on their votes on selected issues, with the most liberal members of Congress earning 100.Posted by Orrin Judd at July 3, 2004 10:06 AMTwo researchers have combined these two disparate ideas to come up with a measure of media bias that doesn't depend on journalists' own perceptions of where they fit on the political spectrum, or on subjective judgments about the philosophical orientation of think tanks. Tim Groseclose, of UCLA and Stanford, and Jeff Milyo of the University of Chicago used data comparing which think tanks various politicians liked to quote and which think tanks various media outlets liked to quote in their news stories to estimate two ADA scores for each media outlet in the study, one based on the number of times a think tank was cited, and the other on the length of the citation.
The media outlets were The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, the three network news shows, Fox News' Special Report and The Drudge Report (the paper is online at www.yale.edu/isps/seminars/american_pol/groseclose.pdf).
"Our results show a very significant liberal bias," they write. "One of our measures found that The Drudge Report is the most centrist of all media outlets in our sample. Our other measure found that Fox News' Special Report is the most centrist." And all three papers, plus NBC and CBS, "were closer to the average Democrat in Congress than to the median member of the House of Representatives."
Like many items this election season - movies (F911, The Global warming movie), misreporting from Iraq, misreporting on the economy, etc - we'll have to wait until 11/2 to see if the public is deceived by all of this.
Posted by: AWW at July 3, 2004 11:53 AM"If the world spun madly out of control, where would they get the boots on the ground?"
Someone should ask Barry Zellen what he intends to do when the world spins madly out of control. Such people would gladly watch the world swirl down a sinkhole rather than take up arms and fight to protect their freedom and security.
"Everyone says, `We've got young children, and we don't want them in the draft,' " said Bill Ghent, a spokesman for Senator Thomas R. Carper, Democrat of Delaware.
When they are drafted, they will no longer be small children, they will become men. But as with everything else that once was considered a necessary condition of civilization, adulthood is now seen as one of many lifestyle choices, like motherhood and fatherhood.
Posted by: Robert Duquette at July 3, 2004 12:50 PMI was watching a show on Nebraska Public Television this morning about Nebraska's participation in the Second World War. It was interesting for someone who is a non-native Nebraskan. In any event, the local paper (the Omaha World Herald) won a special Pultizer Prize in 1942 or 1943 for organizing scrap metal collections. I could not imagine this happening in 2004.
Posted by: pchuck at July 3, 2004 2:40 PMThe only people pushing a draft are those who want to degrade the military.
Posted by: David Cohen at July 3, 2004 5:52 PMI kept looking at that story trying to figure out why any editor, with a shred of self respect would let it go to press.
Posted by: Robert Schwartz at July 5, 2004 2:36 AM