Sound bites are going to eventually hurt communication and the dissemination of information, and in some respects the damage has been done. If you hadn’t heard, Chris Hayes, who has a show on MSNBC, had a rather deep discussion about Memorial Day on his show Sunday. He has a two hour show and for most of the first hour he spent talking about the way we memorialize our soldiers during Memorial Day. The clip that has gone viral amongst conservative bloggers is where Hayes comes back from a commercial break and talks about how uncomfortable he is about using the word hero when speaking about war veterans. That less than one minute clip has been used by conservatives to show how left leaning, armchair pundits are disrespectful to our arms service veterans.

I have always had a problem of people trying to prove a faulty point by using manipulated information. It is true Chris Hayes made the comment he did but if you take it out of context of the roughly ten minute segment where he made the comment, or in the full hour of discussion, you miss the point of what he was trying to convey. In the context of what he was trying to say, a good example would be, and it was used by panelist with Chris Hayes, about the first responders in New York. Of course we would say those men and women were heroes for what they did, and you would obviously think anyone who is a first responder today is doing a noble job, but would you define a first responder today as a hero? The trouble Hayes had with the word is we throw the word hero out for anyone who serves in the military, but that word has a definition that is stronger than what we make it to be. At the end of the segment, the discussion allowed the panelist to realize we use hero in place of bravery or honor, both good words, but hero is the word of choice now.

The conservative pundits, who hate all things liberal, didn’t want to get into the woods and actually have a debate on semantics. A few didn’t even want to get into the facts of the argument. A few commentators tried to make it seem the panel was against Hayes, which wasn’t the case since everyone agreed they had problems with the word hero. One radio host I heard said Hayes was talking to two people and that they showed discomfort at his discussion. Since it was radio the listening public couldn’t look at the video clip to draw their own conclusion and it was obvious the radio host didn’t bother to check the source material because Up with Chris Hayes show always has four panelist and not two.

What we run up on with the Chris Hayes comment, as needed and constructive as it is to have the conversation, is the stubborn wall of not wanting to listen to a perceived dissension because it is counter to what we have been constantly told. Some of the comments I saw on sites that discussed the Chris Hayes comment were upset because they felt Hayes should have been for the troops and should have criticized the policy makers and politicians. If they had watched the whole segment they would have seen the problem he had with hero stemmed from politicians and policy makers who used the word hero to justify the sacrifices of the troops for their agenda. When I watched the panel discussion, I couldn’t help but remember Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch. The information about both were manipulated by those in power to make their stories larger than life, to have the public look at them as heroes in the classic definition of the word. Their stories, one could argue, were heroic without the embellishments on Lynch’s case and the outright lies in the Tillman case. By bolstering the stories with exaggerations and outright lies made the stories less heroic, but not the heroism these two had.

There are going to be a vast number of people who will take the sound bite as gospel, not bothering to check out the website and watch the whole discussion. They will think of it as too much trouble. That lack of curiosity, that lack of questioning what is presented is what has me concerned. With the crucial decisions that will be made by citizens in the next few months, accurate information is needed. To rely on the comments on either side blindly is a recipe for bad choices.

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The Brave and the Bold - May 29, 2012
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