That long, cold fall from grace
I got a few emails from readers about this originally on NRO and Michael Yon’s Facebook Wall. Most of your emails began “WTF?”
I told you to watch the milblogs Monday morning. Here are the results;
No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main….
Category: Bloggers
I’ve only been reading Michael Yon’s facebook briefly- less than six months- but from what I’d been reading the last few weeks, he is acting like he got his feelings hurt, his EGO hurt. Maybe he is/was good at what he does, but he got “the celebrity” and he seems to have turned into your run of the mill prima donna.
We all love what Yon does, but he really is taking the disembed thing too personally. Mike needs to stop digging.
That’s a shame, acting all butt-hurt like that. He has done some great reporting and called out leadership when it needed it, but there have been times he went over the edge. Count this as one of the latter.
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Thank you for the link! I feel like in a few years, I’ll be running writer rehab workshops for guys who need to disengage from whatever has been consuming them for many years. We’ll start with haikus, branch out to structured poetry, then finally after months, I’ll let them have at it and write an epic poem.
I’m sure Michael Yon will have a response. Like I said, this is very painful for me to watch. I do not like see other writers wallow in self inflation. I do not like to see their supporters constantly giving the thumbs up, or swatting critics aside.
I didn’t like writing what I did, but I think any good editor would.
He needs to take some time off. How many years has he been in either Iraq or Afghanistan?
I’m with Kanani. I hate watching this. He does need time off. The question is whether he can allow himself to do that.
Since Obama took office, the ROE situation in Afghanistan has become an absolute clusterfuck. Obama insists that “winning isn’t necessarily a goal”, and his dicked-up foreign policy reflects that. His idiotic campaign to fight “negative stereotypes of Islam” totally ignores the realities of the violent, ideological religion. I feel so sorry for the military troops still serving under this assclown.
Allowing Michael to get kicked to the curb is a big mistake on General McCrystal’s part. The troops need more dedicated, loyal journalists like him to continue reporting the news that the leftwing MSM either slants or refuses to publish.
He’s the last journalist that should be censored.
Here’s Michael Yon’s response to this intervention
It’s posted on his Facebook page (where else) in response to the love letter.. errr “Defense of Michael Yon – An Open Letter to Milbloggers” which he also posted on his Facebook page.
I told you he would spin all this to make you and the milblog community look misguided at best— or in this case ” A hurricane of Hot Air” and that no one should take you and the milblog community seriously or to quote Mike “People who are seriously tracking the war seriously don’t track these guys”
The Captain’s Journal » In Defense of Michael Yon: An Open Letter to Milbloggers
http://www.captainsjournal.com
You can read Hershel’s piece attacking the milblog community in its entirety but here’s Yon’s response:
Michael Yon
Herschel Smith sent a kind email.
Thank you, Herschel,
Bottom line questions: How many milbloggers who were not on active duty (hence sent to the war as a troop) have spent more than a year in the wars? I know of zero. Does one exist? The milblogging community is largely a hurricane of hot air.
There are some …good and responsible writers working milblogs but most of them are LESS ACCURATE than the MSM they oppose.
Please name the top five milblogs — and one person from each — who has spent a year (less than 15% of the war) as a civilian journalist/writer in Iraq/Afghanistan.
Start with http://www.longwarjournal.org/ and Blackfive.
People who are seriously tracking the war seriously don’t track these guys.
Michael Yon
I guess what I want to clear up. This wasn’t an intervention on my part.
An intervention implies that you want someone to get better. As with any manuscript critique, book review, or interview an author, I’ve always been willing to accept they might disagree with me, or even slag me off (I believe Yon called us “hot air”). I was less interested in whether or not he decided to “behave,” as I was in giving a critical assessment of the rants he had posted in real time. So I criticized his recent spate of FB posts and nothing more. I think this was fair game and I took an editorial approach when I did it.
I did not, as Herschel Smith did when he defended Yon, put all his one-sentence FB posts into a longer paragraph. This wouldn’t have been consistent with the way Yon parsed things out in real time on FB.
I also wanted to drive forth that there are so many new writers waiting at the gates, or who have been doing it and despite not receiving 1/100th of the attention and support Yon has received. I’ve recently changed my sidebar to reflect a lot of the new, young talent coming up –people who will be writing about the war over the next five or even ten years. This is exciting to me, and while I respect Yon’s history, the table is getting bigger.
Respectfully,
Kanani Fong
The Kitchen Dispatch