Linkmeister

GQ?

Has anyone else noticed that magazines you never thought of as repositories of hard journalism have suddenly become so? First it was Vanity Fair publishing a story which gave us the famous Wolfowitz quote about going to war over WMD "because it was the one reason everyone could agree on," and now comes Gentleman's Quarterly with a story about the troubles Joe Darby and his family have had since he blew the whistle on the Abu Ghraib scandal. Both Darby and his wife are now in military protective custody, and I can see why.

Each day, she would catch another snippet of the hostility brewing around her. There was the candlelight vigil in Cumberland, Maryland, to show support for the disgraced soldiers, including the ones who did the torturing, about a hundred supporters standing in the pounding rain, as if beating and sodomizing prisoners were some kind of patriotic duty. Or the 200 people who gathered one night in Hyndman, Pennsylvania, waving American flags to honor Sivits, the first soldier tried in the scandal. They posted a sign in Hyndman. It said JEREMY SIVITS, OUR HOMETOWN HERO. And the mayor told reporters that even though Sivits would sometimes do "a little devilish thing," on the whole he was "a wonderful kid."

Where were the signs for Joe? Bernadette had to wonder. Where was his vigil? Where was his happy mayor? Where were his calls of support? Down at the gas station, Clay overheard some guys say that Joe was "walking around with a bull's-eye on his head," just casually, just like, oh, everybody knows Joe's dead. Some of Bernadette's family even let her know that other members of the family were against her now, that they couldn't support a traitor. The more Bernadette heard, the more paranoid she became. How serious was this? Her nerves were so fried from the media onslaught that she couldn't be sure what was serious and what was just talk. Had those cops really ignored Maxine because they were against Joe? And if so, what else would they ignore?

This is terrifying stuff, worthy of a full reading. (Link courtesy of Digby).

A sociologist could go on and on about the behavior of the Darby's neighbors, recounting theories of group dynamics, closed societies, and yadda yadda yadda. My question is, why are the major media outlets not writing this stuff? Why is it not on Primetime Thursday, rather than the insipid pap that program has recently given us? Or on 60 Minutes, which has given us nothing but re-runs since it interviewed Senators Kerry and Edwards before the Democratic Convention? Why do we find these stories in the so-called "glossy" magazines instead of the more obvious ones?