On answers and demanding them

It's not entirely coincidence that these were the second and third top stories at your Fair 'n' Balanced Homepage on Saturday morning. Both of them shine a light on the achievements of our friends in what's now known as "strategic communication."

First, it's reasonable to conclude that the vicious loonies of the Islamic State movement have adapted the lessons of 1970s-style "siege and barricade" terrorism to the age of interactive media. They don't even have to go to the Fox News budget meeting. They can get a story on the front page whenever they want.* A little skepticism about the veracity of any particular bit of propaganda is a good idea; if Fox wants to raise such concerns in the same place it usually does ISIS' bidding, good for Fox.

That suggests, of course, that when someone on your own side who knows exactly how to land on your front page pushes the button, your first reaction should probably be: Hmm. I wonder why he wants a chunk of my front page for this bit of information. Not, in other words, "Top Republican senators Friday demanded answers." Aside from conflating "we" with "top Republican senators," which is delightfully honest in its own little way, Fox is missing a chance to learn from its mistakes. When somebody just cold-ass beats you to the basket, it's probably better to ask why you got beaten, rather than to suggest that the other guy is a traitor for exploiting your friendly gullibility.

Because it's Saturday, and because realism and deranged exceptionalism will ever be at odds, here's your weekend Hans Morgenthau quote:

The first lesson the student of international politics must learn and never forget is that the complexities of international affairs make simple solutions and trustworthy predictions impossible. Here the scholar and the charlatan part company.

Charles Krauthammer, George Will --- call your office

* If you're reconsidering the degree to which you should help them in that effort, you should.

There's a winner every time

As a general rule, if you take newspaper headlines about survey results at face value, you should stay away from those friendly games of chance at the county fair. In this case, though, WashTimes readers have a little extra reason to be peeved, because the home team is lying to them.

OK, maybe not technically lying. Unlike "rising" or "falling," which are negatable, "in free fall" is just impressionistic enough that the journalistic expert involved can claim, in effect: Well, it looks like free fall to me! And in an abstract world, you'd kind of like the idea of an expert who defies the apparent evidence to tell you what's really going on. The trouble with this one is that there are no meaningful values of "free fall" -- and almost none of "fall" -- for which the claim is true.

Democrat Cory Booker’s lead over Republican Steve Lonegan in the race to fill New Jersey’s vacant Senate seat has shrunk to 10 points with about 48 hours to go before Wednesday’s special election.

No doubt it's pretty to think so, and it'd be cherry-picking to point out that in the most recent poll, the Democrat's support had fallen from 52 percent to 54 percent. (Let's just use the polls collected at the generally execrable RealClearPolitics, for the heck of it.) No doubt the Times is extrapolating from the poll before that, in which he fell from 58 to 52 percent. But that ignores the previous poll, in which he fell from 53 to 58, or the one before that, in which he fell from 50 to 53 -- starting to get the idea here?
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You through?

Disclosure time first. Your Editor doesn't pay much attention to football and thus deferred watching the 2012 Chrysler ad -- the two-minute epic starring Clint Eastwood -- until this morning. I wasn't all that impressed initially, but having watched the Fair 'n' Balanced Network's evolving reaction over the course of the day, I'm inclined to revise that opinion. Any mediated event that puts a knot so large in Fox's knickers is fine with me, and that's over and above the innate awesomeness of Clint Eastwood.
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News and propaganda

Here's an interesting bit of evidence in the ongoing debate about whether Fox News is fundamentally a news organization or a propaganda organization. Revisions to GDP estimates are a fairly routine sort of story. They aren't emergencies or surprises; they happen at regular times in regular places, and, like sporting events, their news value depends in part on how much the actual outcome diverges from the expected outcome.*

What distinguishes this example is not the data itself but the way it's categorized for Fox readers. GDP growth is an objective element in the happiest sense of the term: there's an agreed definition and way of measuring it, so you can report it without accusations of bias. But at Fox, it's not a biz story or an economy story or a national story; it's placed under "politics."

Notice something else? Comments are enabled. Readers don't get the chance to "speak up" or "join the conversation" on every story at Fox, as they do at many other news outlets. I don't know if anyone's established a conclusive pattern yet, but it looks as if Fox doesn't bother with comments on stories that don't fit a kind of ritualistic, let's-sit-at-the-bar-and-bitch-about-the-old-days function.

The capture above shows no comments so far. If I were the betting sort, I'd bet that the first comments would be from these general categories:

How's that HOPE and CHANGE working out for you now?
10% unemployment doesn't feel like a "recovery" to me.
Worst and most corrupt administration in history.

For you media-effects fans out there (or Language Log visitors who kept up with the weekend's framing discussion), this is a highly testable bit of media framing: Does it make a difference in attitudes or depth of processing to categorize a GDP story as "politics" rather than "economics"? Under the right circumstances, it probably does. I don't think Fox knows that, in the sense that it hasn't tested the effect among 160 extra-credit-seeking undergraduates in a survey class somewhere, but that doesn't mean it isn't a deliberate ideological choice.

* NB: The story has moved up to the No. 2 position, with the hed "3Q Growth Marred By GDP Slowdown." As is often the case at Fox, it's hard to tell whether the hed reflects dishonesty or simple incompetence. The GDP didn't "slow down"; it didn't increase as much as the initial estimate had suggested. Funny thing is that at Fox, that category of error only happens on one side of the aisle.

Wanna buy a bridge?

The (hem, kaff) liberal media seem to be taking the Fox bait quite happily:

South Carolina is at the center of a national grass-roots debate on Tax Day, with thousands expected to attend two rallies in the city today protesting the country’s tax burden and tax system.

Here's a particularly naive entry from the nest of commie spies at Stonewall and Tryon:

Some groups like “Fair Tax,” which seeks to abolish the Internal Revenue Service, will try to sign up members today. But there appears to be no common agenda other than reducing taxes and spending.

Let's have a look at the discourse and see if there's a "common agenda" in there:

Alleged columnist Cal Thomas: While the deficit last week raced past $1 trillion, the federal government and many state governments are trying to pry more of our money from us so they can finish creating a dependency culture from which we'll never escape.

Fox blogger Dan Gainor: It’s obvious the left understands. ... To see a grassroots movement rise up against Democrats’ crazy spending just a couple months into their mis-administration terrifies them.

Fox blogger Peter Roff: Just like King George III, Obama and the Democrats want to make us believe they are doing it for our own good and in our own best interests.

Fox blogger Andrea Tantaros: The message is simple: repeal the pork, cut taxes and cut spending. But there is much more at stake than the money. The impact these actions will have on our culture is key. Massive government control is a clear threat to our liberties and our values of American exceptionalism.

And that would mean?

As power is increasingly transferred to the government, it will seek to dilute and destroy our most precious values — from the sanctity of marriage to the right to bear arms, free speech and other fundamentals of our constitution. The Obama Doctrine seeks to do just that: strip power from people, put government — and ultimately the tenants of radicalism — in control.

Are things starting to sink in yet? It isn't the taxes.* It's the colored fella in Washington who wants to take all your money and impose European communist socialism and quarter British naval officers in your home so he can gay-marry your sons to them! WAKE UP, AMERICA!!!!!

You don't have to take the commentators' word for it. Fox has kindly put all its news coverage together for your convenience. You can find out how to organize a successful protest, which craven solons are sitting it out, how the liberal ACORNs are planning to identity-theft protesters so Obama can send them to Guantanamo -- everything a carefully orchestrated movement needs. As Fox has made clear, it might say spending on the surface, but it's all about the "intervention."** If you're still not clear on the distinction, I'm looking out the window at a really neat bridge that could be yours for a song.

I'm looking forward to the tea party coverage. I'm expecting careful crowd counts, lots of questions about the actual impact of tax rates, and quotes out the yazoo whenever the word "grassroots" appears.

* By the way? If your story forgets to ask the mad-as-hell protesters whether their federal taxes have gone up or down in the past two months, it's incomplete.
** Isn't it cool that "intervention" started showing up during the week that two states took the distinctly anti-interventionist step of not restricting marriage to opposite-sex couples? Reporters could ask about that when they're covering tea parties too!

Through the looking-glass

So much Fox, so little time!

We're fed up and we're not gonna take it anymore.

Such is the rallying cry building across the country as taxpayers take a stand against what they see as reckless spending in Washington -- all part of a peculiar and rather sudden movement called "tea parties."

Some small, some large, locals* converge at the parties to voice their frustration over the federal government's economic policies. The protests have sprouted up from coast-to-coast and city-to-city since late February.

"People are getting killed -- they're getting hammered with taxes and it's not the way this country is supposed to be run.** ... We want to fight back," said Kristina Mancini, who's helping organize the April 15 rally in Fishkill, N.Y.

Don't miss Fox's commanding grasp of the historical analogy!

The historical parallels may seem sparse. America is no longer a colony. It is not ruled by a king.

But just as the 18th century decrees of the King of England drew outrage from American colonists, several acts of modern U.S. government intervention have stirred similar upheaval.

The Stamp Act? Now it's the Wall Street bailout.

The Tea Act? Now it's the $787 billion stimulus package.

The Quartering Act? Now it's the pork-filled omnibus spending bill.

The Boston Massacre? That would have to be the proposed $3.55 trillion 2010 budget, seen by tea partiers as a fiscal massacre.

The Sons of Liberty of today is led by people like Rick Santelli, the CNBC reporter widely credited with helping spark the tea-party fever nationwide (though tea parties were being held before Santelli plugged them).

... Though he was mocked by the White House, Santelli might as well have yelled, "Give me liberty or give me death!"

Digest the thing in its delightful entirety. Admire the skills of Judson Berger, whose reporting prowess elevated the Chia Pet story from obscurity to top-of-the-front play. Garnish liberally*** with comments. Chase with a shot of Deputy ME Bill Sammon recycling last fall's Joe Biden story like -- well, like a veritable Joe the Recycler. Every meal a banquet on Planet Fox!

* Mostly large, I'm betting. Best dangler I've seen all week.
** It isn't?
*** He'll be here all week, folks; don't forget to tip.

Books: Threat or menace?

What's the Third Most Super-Important Story in the Whole Wide World over at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network? Aw, you peeked!

Are children's book publishers seeking to indoctrinate impressionable young readers -- or are they simply obeying the laws of supply and demand?

Fox's story is an eight-graf rewrite from that temple of thoughtful journalism known as the Washington Times -- well, sort of a rewrite. The question above and several other grafs are copied from the Times's frontpage article, though they carry a Fox creditline.* It has several hallmarks of the Stupid Question; it's not exhaustive, and more to the point, it's easy to answer with "Why is that a question?"** But it's not a multiple question, for which we need to turn to the Times itself:

Is there something fishy about the publishing industry's haste to anoint Barack Obama in the eyes of uniquely impressionable readers?

Got the answers yet?

* Yes, there's something fishy about the publishing industry's haste to anoint Barack Obama in the eyes of uniquely impressionable readers.

* No, there's nothing fishy about the publishing industry's haste to anoint Barack Obama in the eyes of uniquely impressionable readers.

Some news organizations screw up occasionally. Some are dishonest as a matter of policy. Any questions about Fox and the WaTms natdesk?

* There's a word for that, isn't there? Starts with "P"?
** Note that you can't do the same thing with "Paper or plastic?" or "What would you like to drink?"

The construction of reality

Today's front page offers another example of the made-up story: not supernatural creatures prowling the suburbs or slanderous fictions about a candidate's past, but an unsupported statement about the way things ought to be if only you people would pay attention.

News is "objective" because it's (at least notionally) empirical. Something observable distinguishes today from yesterday: Troops cross border, volcano kills hundreds, plane lands in river. Our lead hed here is stating a testable relationship that would yield such a difference. There's a measurable thing called "'Buy American' pressure," it's greater at Time B than it was at Time A, and that difference is significant at some predetermined confidence level (meaning it represents a real difference, not an accident of sampling or measurement). But our story isn't about any such thing. It's about a woman who annoys her fellow drivers, and then it veers off to a development official, some guys who make bumper stickers and a self-selecting poll of online readers.

The story proclaims that "'Buy American' is a revived sentiment these days in Michigan," and it asks the development official whether "the most recent resurgence in Buy American sentiment" is a good thing, but it doesn't say how those conclusions were reached -- or even whether the newspaper is interested in (or capable of) measuring them. Those sentiments might be real or they might not; either way, the process that put them at the top of the front page is a persuasive one, not a journalistic one. It's no different from what another news organization -- let's call it Rabid Hyena News -- might do by proclaiming that "concerns are growing" about some candidate's unrepentant socialist anti-American terrorist plans to ruin entire industries, or that "outrage" has followed some ruling that threatens Our Kids. It reflects the news organization's view of how the world works, and it resonates ideologically with the audience, but it isn't really news.

Well, not really

Interesting case of the moral obtuseness of journalism, attributable here to the copydesk (the story itself isn't bad at all). This is the sort of hed that goes on stories about colonies or mandates or long-oppressed subprovinces gaining their independence. With Iraq, it only works if history didn't begin until around 2004.

The trouble with the hed is that Iraq is actually kind of familiar with the road to "self-rule," which it had enjoyed for, oh, seven decades or so until some unfortunate events of this decade. Your State Department is almost as disingenuous as your newspapers:

Independence: On October 3, 1932, Iraq gained independence from the League of Nations Mandate under British Administration. Several coups after 1958 resulted in dictatorship. The Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) was established in 2003 under Multi-National Force - Iraq protections.

... but that's really a matter of degree, isn't it?

A few brief reminders for the new year. "Self-rule" is not a synonym for enlightened rule, or for democracy, or for anything else. It's what members of the interstate system do when they govern themselves. Self-ruled Iraq, under the Saddam Hussein regime, was internally vicious and externally thuggish; the Reagan administration* ignored the former because it found the latter so useful at killing, mangling or otherwise containing the Iranians. Like many other moral or tactical blunders in international relations, it apparently seemed like a really good idea at the time.

Competent, humane rule might be new to Iraq, assuming it arrives. Self-rule isn't. If you don't want to be mistaken for a propaganda tool, you need to be able to tell the difference.

* And, to a lesser extent, Carter (who had far less of a record to judge) and Bush I (right up to the invasion of Kuwait).

Funday Framing Foxtacular!

Back in the days before newsroom culture got the attention of real sociologists, like Herbert Gans and Gaye Tuchman, we had to grow our own. Lots of the early work was done by old news hands, generally under the influence of the Chicago school, who went to PhD camp and came back to try to explain to the outside world what sorts of things went on between the occurrence of "news" and its appearance on newspaper pages. And lots of it holds up well today -- David Whyte's "The Gate Keeper," for example, and Warren Breed's "Social Control in the Newsroom," to which we turn for today's lesson.






When you look at how "bias" can be expected to filter down from the boardroom to what you see or read, it's tempting to think of a diabolical publisher with his (for male is what he almost always is) finger in every decision and his touch on every headline. Fat chance. Few publishers can write even one headline,* let alone the dozens a rimster will knock out in a shift, and they have other stuff to do besides intervening in the multiple scores of decisions made around the newsroom.

More to the point, as Breed** explains in detail, intervention isn't necessary. Journalists learn what's supposed to go in the paper -- what "news" looks and sounds like, and how "policy" shapes its presence or absence, at their particular shops -- through a complex system of nods, nudges, winks, and implications. So if your question is "Wow, did Murdoch himself order that Hillary hed onto the FoxNews.com front page this morning?" the answer is "No. Inept, patently fabricated stories get to the Fox front page of their own accord!" Staffers learn by imitation. They learn by watching news budget meetings -- not because the policy line is laid down there, but because it's implied in the discussions of "reliability of information, newsworthiness, possible 'angles' and other news tactics" (1955, p. 329). They learn by seeing what gets in and what doesn't. Murdoch can sleep in on Sundays because the folks unlucky or junior enough to draw that shift know what looks like news through Fox-colored glasses.

In other words, it didn't take much thought for someone to green-light the Hillary story mentioned here. It's somebody else's, so we can say "Report says" instead of "We say." It has that respectable international patina (despite the occasional charming tendency of the British press to, oh, make stuff up when there's nothing interesting to report). And it's "campaign" news -- or at least, it looks enough like campaign news to get past the checkpoint.

Needless to say, "Report: Dumped Cat Could Come Back to Haunt Hillary Clinton Campaign" is a crock from start to finish. There is no "report." There's a commentary in the Sunday Times, a Murdoch property that has longer sentences and fewer Page Three Girls than the Sun. The "some" who "believe" the Socks tale could thwart Clinton don't exist; that's spun from one commentary in the Atlantic. Mostly, the Times article used some rented snark to hang a week's worth of anti-Hillary laundry. Somebody at Fox has learned the lessons well.

* Rolfe Neill of Charlotte, whom Charles Kuralt pointed out in one of his books as the guy who taught him how to draw a page, is an honorable exception.
** Breed, W. (1955). Social control in the newsroom: A functional analysis. Social Forces, 33, 326-335.

You provide the pictures ...

Return with us now to those thrilling days of yester-year, when unscrup-ulous news organi-zations would find a story to cook up, then fab-ricate a breathless "reaction" to it, then report on how the reaction spread, and so forth until the mob was at the castle gates with pitchforks and torches. Yes, it's the yellow journalism of the 21st century, and it's the Fair 'n' Balanced Crowd showing the way again!

This one first arose yesterday, and there are some good lessons in the basic blocking-and-tackling of propaganda therein:
1) Never invent facts; stick to inventing the implications that go around them.
2) Try to put a new layer of attribution between yourself and the original factoid every news cycle. (If you start with "Senate challenger says Foghorn has it off with goats comma sheep," you want to move as soon as possible through "Foghorn denies goat, sheep charge" to "Voters react to Foghorn denial" and "Poll shows denial costing Foghorn support.")
3) Force multiplication is your friend! Once the commentators start commentating, you have two streams of input to feed the reaction stories.

Enough theory, though: Let's wrap up News Judgment Week with a look at some practice!

Our story surfaces on Thursday, as Fox pumps some air into a low-bore AP piece that has Obama referring back a comment he'd made the day before in a TV interview. And the lede makes pretty clear it's a second-day story: Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama says he no longer wears an American flag lapel pin because it has become a substitute for "true patriotism" since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Fox is cheating with the hed, "Obama Stops Wearing Flag Pin," but it's cheating on the syntax rather than the facts. In hed dialect, the present tense signals events in the "immediate past," or roughly the time since the most recent publication. Hence the second-cycling of, say, crime stories; when one news cycle (morning papers) uses "CONVENIENCE STORE ROBBED," the next cycle gets "CLUES SOUGHT IN ROBBERY" because the immediate past has rotated a notch. The hed you expect is on the order of "Obama explains lapel-pin comments," because the immediate past doesn't cover stuff that happened five or six years ago, but "violation of hed pragmatics" isn't the same as "liar, liar, pants on fire."

The real fun starts with today's follow-up, whence the illustration above is drawn. (The News Sociology Department would also like to point out that allotting staff resources to a story you'd originally taken off the AP wire signals a ratcheting-up of its perceived importance, and three Fox hands have a share of the byline on this puppy.) Again, there's nothing strictly false in the hed ("Candidates Have Their Say on Obama's Decision Not to Wear Flag Pin"). The reefer to the video ("VIDEO: Barack Obama Decides Not To Continnue Wearing a Flag Pin on his Lapel") is pragmatically misleading -- the immediate-past deal works for other forms of display type too -- but not technically false. "SPACE AVAILABLE"? Well, all that says is that "space is available"; it doesn't actually say "and the sinister green flag of Islam would look just peachy here," does it?

And the lede -- well, who's to tell the difference between a journalistic cliche and a bit of deliberate distortion?

Barack Obama may choose not to wear an American flag pin on his lapel, but many of the presidential contender's political rivals say they wouldn't leave home without one.

"Many," eh? Let's see:

Democratic frontrunner Hillary Rodham Clinton told FOXNews.com Thursday night that she sometimes wears a pin to show her patriotism. “Wearing a flag pin, flying the flag, pledging allegiance to the flag, talking about the values that are important to America, teaching your children about what a great nation you have, standing up for those values, speaking out … there’s just so many ways that one can demonstrate patriotism,” Clinton said at a Chicago fundraiser.

A spokesman for Joe Biden told FOXNews.com that the Delaware senator "always wears a flag pin." It wasn't clear whether Dennis Kucinich wears a pin, but a spokeswoman told FOXNews.com that the Ohio congressman does "does carry a mini copy of the Constitution in his pocket."

So far, it's one sometimes, one always and one -- well, the Kucinich Desk is welcome to check in here, but it sounds as if Dennis is rather pointedly suggesting that he falls back on a Higher Power.

No comment from Edwards, Dodd or Richardson. On the Party O'Lincoln side, McCain's in the "not daily" camp, with an aide saying his service record speaks to the issue quite adequately, thanks. Tancredo says he wears one "to show he’s proud to be an American" (which, of course, effectively dodges the frequency question). Huckabee's camp says he always wore the flag pin when he was governor (ibid, but he doesn't have to wipe the foam from around his lips). Hunter is "proud to wear an American flag pin as much as possible and on any occasion." No callbacks from Paul, Giuliani, Romney or Thompson.

So it looks like the confirmed "don't leave home without it" camp is down to Joe Biden and a cast of ... well, many. (For that matter, pace the frontpage cutline, only one of the candidates seems to have "sounded off" on Obama's decision.) But the lede's assertion isn't false in fact; we've just established a new context for the facts and moved the debate from what Obama said to what people said about what he said. And sure enough, by noon, the Streicherettes had begun to chime in. Pure-play textbook -- almost like watching Phil Ford run the Four Corners again, innit?

Somebody on the Obama campaign needs to buy the senator a copy of "The Virtue of STFU-ness." For the rest of us: The past isn't history. Hell, it isn't even past.

Ministry of Truth

This just in from Commissar Murdoch's New York Post, in case you hadn't heard yet how you were supposed to think about Monday's events:
Here's the news story referred to from the front. Some excerpts:

Calm and unflinching, the four-star U.S. commander in Iraq impressed even hard-core war critics in Congress yesterday, announcing that some troops can begin coming home this month, 30,000 can return by next summer, and even more joyous reunions are on the horizon.
Gen. David Petraeus, delivering his long-awaited report with commanding skill, said there's been "substantial" progress in fighting al Qaeda and sectarian violence that justifies the first troop drawdown of the four-year war.

The low-key but firm Petraeus - in his Army green laden with medals for his star turn under sparkling chandeliers - used color-coded charts and graphs to show a skeptical joint House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs committees that the current troop surge met its objectives "in large measure."

Even Democrats who despise the war policy were deferential in the face of the top-notch general's even-keeled demeanor and impressive rows of shiny silver stars, four to a shoulder.

"He's one of the best," said Democratic Rep. Ike Skelton of Missouri, who ran proceedings in the ornate hearing room and ordered a succession of protesters ejected when they shouted their anger at the war.

... The no-nonsense military leader didn't specify how soon or how large the later reductions would be. But he presented a chart that visualized only five brigades remaining - about one fourth of the current force - and most of the troops in a "partnering" role with Iraqi security.

The general said he had briefed higher-ups in the chain of command but wrote his report himself. "It has not been cleared by, nor shared with anyone in the Pentagon, the White House or Congress," he said of his testimony.

Even on an editorial page, this would be suspect; as a rule, we ought to stop being impressed by the shininess of any particular row of stars by age 11 or so. On a newspage ... well, let's bear in mind that the real fault line in mainstream U.S. journalism isn't between "left" and "right" media. It's between the professional media (which extend roughly from the notional political center to the center-right) and the armed propaganda wing of the Bush administration. The grownups have their own sets of biases and blind spots -- sometimes amusing, sometimes outright dangerous -- but they also have some course-correction and self-righting mechanisms. At the Murdoch properties, the blind spot is the mission; you might as well expect Fox News to admit that the earth is round.

Wait'll Ernie Pyle hears about this

The vigilant gang over at Fox has caught the Hollywood panty-waists making light of America again! Here's the dominant art from early afternoon (until the before-and-after of Osama's new beard look was ready).

What Hollywood is doing, of course, is plotting to geld this American icon by turning him into some sort of internationalized UN-loving do-gooder. Take it away, Fox:

Say it ain't so, G.I. Joe.

The popular all-American comic-book military man and action figure dating back to the 1940s is undergoing a significant transformation for the Paramount Pictures-distributed "G.I. Joe" film, which begins production in February and is scheduled for release in summer 2009.

No longer will G.I. Joe be a U.S. Special Forces soldier, the "Real American Hero" who, in his glory days, single-handedly won World War II.

Christski. G.I. Joe was Soviet infantryman? Is to reel the mind.

In the politically correct new millennium, G.I. Joe bears no resemblance to the original.

At this point, it's fair to point out that he hasn't borne any resemblance to the original for quite some time. Here's a "Private Breger" by Dave Breger, who originated the "G.I. Joe" strip in Yank in 1942. By one account, Breger had to pick a new name for the strip because "Private Breger" was already in commercial syndication, so ... the rest is history. (Mildly exaggerated at the OED, which dates Breger and Joe to 1842, but history all the same.) By 1945, Joe was well enough known to provide a title for "The Story of G.I. Joe," about Ernie Pyle in North Africa.

Now, Pyle's troops -- not to mention Bill Mauldin's, to drag in another draftsman* who became known for his wartime drawings -- were not Special Forces by any stretch of the imagination. One would like to think they might dispute the Real American Heroes bit too (which title didn't come along, G.I.-Joe-doll-wise, until the beginning of the Reagan administration anyway). But Fox has other points to make:

... Joe's transformation, however, isn't sitting well with diehard fans and military types.

"I find it outrageous that they'd want to drop everything American" from the character, said conservative blogger Warner Todd Huston, who wrote about the rumors this week on Newsbusters.org and his own blog. "That's nuts."

Retired Army Col. David W. Hunt, a FOX News military and terrorism analyst, called the scheme to make a whole new Joe "a shame."

"G.I. Joe is a U.S. guy," Hunt said. "What are we going to call it — Global Joe? International Joe? It's kind of stupid. It's ridiculous that they're doing that."

Hmm. Bit of a sourcing stretch from one chickenhawk and one colonel on the Fox payroll to a groundswell of red-blooded outrage, but there you have it. On to the potted history:

The comic-book character and toy line have already undergone an evolution of sorts since Joe first won the hearts of American little boys — and some little girls — beginning in 1942 with the comic strip and in the early 1960s with the action figure.

... In the post-Vietnam War era in the 1970s, Hasbro decided to downplay G.I. Joe's military theme by renaming the line "The Adventures of G.I. Joe" and recasting Joe as the leader of an adventure team charged with espionage missions and fighting evil.
But in the 1980s, the toy company Hasbro made G.I. Joe more of a superhero and added a host of other action figures, expanding the line to include characters that made up a team of international operatives. (So the, erm, damage has already been done? On Reagan's watch, no less!!)

Now some critics say the globalization of G.I. Joe has gone too far.

Really? Which?

"G.I. Joe is not an international hero. That's crap," said Col. Hunt. "They don't have to water it down. That doesn't make sense."

Gee. Let's close our eyes and guess who the other critic might be!

For blogger Huston, who played with G.I. Joe as a boy, transforming the entire character into an amorphous task force in the movie feels like a hit to his childhood memories.

Uh, Fox? Gang? Guys? Did y'all know your angry chickenhawk plays with dolls????? Just asking.

Huston believes it's the latest example of Hollywood's hostility toward all things American, and he said he probably won't go to see the film if the existing plans are executed.

"It's the last spit in the face of our military," Huston said. "The doll was G.I. Joe, the government-issued guy who was a hero and American. It was celebrating this one heroic soldier. They want to take even that away."

Suppose we should point out that it was America-hating Hollywood that turned Pyle's Captain Waskow into "Captain Walker"? Or would that be rubbing it in?

One tends to think that Pyle would have a low tolerance for Fox's yip-yip-yip-to-war attitude. Given Mauldin's political proclivities, it's more than fair to guess he would too. So let's give Willie and Joe the last word:

We calls 'em garritroopers. They're too far forward to wear ties an' too far back to get shot.

* Yank also published the wartime work of Bil Keane, he of the Family Circus. Some days one is gladder than others that one didn't go the media history route, isn't one?

(Yeah, the title is stolen from Mauldin too, in case you're wondering)