Marine Sergeant Rob Richards. via

For just a moment I allowed myself to think that it could be the first sign of a turnaround in the media culture of the past forty years, or that by one of those mysterious shifts in the température d’âme that happen from time to time, there might now be a new tolerance, honor, and reason, and at least a partial abandonment of the scandal craze which has held our public life in thrall for nearly half a century. Of course that was too much to hope, but I could scarcely believe my eyes at the main headline above the fold in the Sunday Washington Post—the paper which, during Watergate and Vietnam, had itself done so much to create the addiction to scandal which has characterized the American media down to the present day. The headline read: “Defined by 38 Seconds,” and was followed by the subhead: “Marine sniper in video scandal is remembered as greater than the clip that stalked him.”

True, the online version of the story moved the scandal back up front in the headline: “For Marine who urinated on dead Taliban, a hero’s burial at Arlington,” but the piece was full of compassion for the formerly scandalous one, Marine Sergeant Rob Richards, who was demoted to corporal and discharged from service as a result of the scandal.

Almost everything about war is complicated, messy, or morally fraught; in this case even more so.