There’s a reason some news is never reported

About once a week, some reader is kind enough to forward something from the Internet that shows what an absolutely abysmal job the news media are doing on some topic.

Sometimes the complaint involves not telling them that Barack Obama was really born in Africa, or is a closet Muslim, or perhaps is from another planet. I can live with that, because a) I’m pretty sure he wasn’t born in Africa but couldn’t prove otherwise to their satisfaction if my life depended on it; b) I take all people at their word on their religion but wouldn’t care if he were a Muslim; and c) I’m from another planet, too, and we aliens stick together.

Other times it involves stories of the military and military heroism, which the e-mail’s anonymous author insists the NEWS MEDIA WILL NEVER TELL YOU.

As someone who covers the military for a paper, it is mildly annoying to suggest any newspaper would pass up a good story of heroism. They’re much more fun to write than, say, stories about sewer rates or zoning changes.

The real reason we usually haven’t told the story in the forwarded e-mail is because some aspect isn’t true.

Take the story of the late Ed Freeman, a decorated Army helicopter pilot from the Vietnam War. According to an e-mail now in its fifth or sixth iteration, he didn’t get the media coverage he deserves.

That Freeman was a hero for flying his helicopter in and out of the Ia Drang Valley in 1965, when members of the 1st Cavalry were vastly outnumbered and pinned down, is not in question. Whether the Army fully recognized it at the time might be, considering he got the Distinguished Service Cross back then, but wasn’t awarded the Medal of Honor until 2001. When President Bush gave him the nation’s highest military honor, newspapers all over the country, including The Spokesman-Review, reported that.

The battle may sound familiar because it was the basis for the movie “We Were Soldiers,” in which Freeman was played by Mark McCracken.

Toward the bottom of the e-mail is often a mention of someone else who died the same day and got more – and much less deserved – coverage. For a while it was Paul Newman, even though they died several weeks apart.

“Medal of Honor Recipient Ed Freeman died on Wednesday, March 25, 2009, at the age of 80, in Boise, ID. May God rest his soul,” the e-mail says near the end. “Since the media didn’t give him the coverage he deserves, send this to every red-blooded American you know.”

There is one minor problem with that part of the message. Freeman didn’t die on March 25. He died last August in Boise. When that happened, his hometown newspaper, the Idaho Statesman, published a long story recounting his life.

Like many Internet stories that survive through the repeated forwarding to multiple addresses, the date of his death keeps changing. Some versions say “last Wednesday.” Some newspapers, apparently feeling chastised for a lack of patriotism, reprinted all or most of the e-mail, including the March date, without so much as a Google search.

This isn’t to suggest readers should stop sending e-mails that show how bad we’ve messed up. Just understand we’ll double check them, even if you don’t.