HE JUST KEEPS TALKING…. Earlier this week, Samuel “Joe the Plumber” Wurzelbacher, “reporting” from Israel, insisted that journalists shouldn’t be allowed to cover a war, in part because reporters “make a big deal” over events on the ground, and in part because media professionals want to “down soldiers.” Wurzelbacher added, “I think media should be abolished from, uh, you know, reporting.”
Yesterday, he explained what he meant.
“[Y]ou don’t need to see what’s happening every day, that’s my personal opinion, you don’t have to share it. But, you know, okay, you don’t have to see, you know, 800 dead, 801 dead. It’s like they drill that in your head…. They want you to sit there saying there are so many people dying. You know these are large, these are numbers, you know I don’t want to take away from that. Let me, uh, think about how to say that again. Just essentially, they keep drilling it into your head, newscast after newscast after newscast.
“I think the military should decide what information to give the media and then the media can release it to the public. I don’t believe they need to be in the front lines with soldiers, I don’t believe they need to, uh, you know, be bothering the military for information or for access to certain areas.”
Over at Outside The Wire, conservative blogger JD Johannes, who has reported from the front lines, has seen just about enough of Wurzelbacher.
By making a 15-minute-of-fame political media celebrity its point man in Israel, PJTV took a risk and they’ve now been bitten by it.
Joe is now the face of PJTV. His saying that reporters should not be with front line soldiers undercuts any effort by PJTV to put reporters on the front lines of a war. […]
Joe would make the government the dispenser of information — gee, what could go wrong with that? The plumber should stick to what he does best as a media personality — relating things as a father and skilled tradesman trying to make a living. When he moves beyond that, he is out of his depth.
Johannes added that Wurzelbacher seems to be living in a “fantasy world.”
