Army Vet Departs NBC, Trashes Network in Farewell Letter Conservatives have long maintained that the mainstream media are increasingly obsessed with President Donald Trump and detached from the world … not to mention reality. Now, a longtime NBC News contributor is essentially saying the same thing — but he’s no conservative darling. This week, former U.S. Army intelligence expert and journalist William Arkin announced that he’s parting ways with the often left-leaning network, and he held nothing back in his blunt criticisms of NBC and the mainstream media as a whole. In a lengthy farewell memo to NBC that was obtained and published by news rival CNN, the military affairs expert accused networks of being distracted by “the Trump circus” and ignoring important happenings around the globe. “I find myself completely out of synch with the network, being neither a day-to-day reporter nor interested in the Trump circus,” Arkin wrote. Some might be tempted to dismiss the journalist as either a right-wing military hawk or some sort of liberal peacenik, but Arkin is more complex than that. Although he certainly respects the military and knows it well, he has also been deeply critical of warmongers from both parties and an early whistle-blower of the power structure that today is called the “deep state.” That position — understanding the military but distrusting those who want constant war — has put him in a very odd place in the 21st century. “I spoke up about the absence of any sort of strategy for actually defeating terrorism, annoying the increasing gaggles of those who seemed to accept that a state of perpetual war was a necessity,” Arkin wrote. But then he turned his ire toward NBC News and the current state of the media overall. “Somewhere in all of that, and particularly as the social media wave began, it was clear that NBC (like the rest of the news media) could no longer keep up with the world,” Arkin wrote. Democrats, including former President Barack Obama, were not off the hook, either. “Seeking refuge in its political horse race roots, NBC (and others) meanwhile report the story of war as one of [former Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld vs. the Generals, as [former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul] Wolfowitz vs. [former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric] Shinseki, as the CIA vs. [former Vice President Dick] Cheney, as the bad torturers vs. the more refined, about numbers of troops and number of deaths, and even then Obama vs. the Congress, poor Obama who couldn’t close Guantanamo or reduce nuclear weapons or stand up to [Russian leader Vladimir] Putin because it was just so difficult,” Arkin wrote. The big problem, the veteran journalist explained, is that much of the media has become the state’s lapdog, unwilling to call out those who hold power in Washington because networks themselves are now part of the Beltway muck. “We have contributed to turning the world national security into this sort of political story. I find it disheartening that we do not report the failures of the generals and national security leaders,” Arkin wrote. “I feel like I’ve failed to convey this larger truth about the hopelessness of our way of doing things, especially disheartened to watch NBC and much of the rest of the news media somehow become a defender of Washington and the system,” he continued. Amazingly, the journalist who was once a foil of the Reagan administration defended President Trump — at least slightly — and confirmed what conservatives have been saying for the past year: The media are so obsessed with bashing Trump that they’ve lost the plot. “For me I realized how out of step I was when I looked at Trump’s various bumbling intuitions: his desire to improve relations with Russia, to denuclearize North Korea, to get out of the Middle East, to question why we are fighting in Africa, even in his attacks on the intelligence community and the FBI,” Arkin wrote. All of those were generally good moves by Trump, the reporter suggested, but the media refused to give credit for policies that they would have cheered if a liberal had suggested them. “I’m alarmed at how quick NBC is to mechanically argue the contrary, to be in favor of policies that just spell more conflict and more war. Really? We shouldn’t get out Syria?” Arkin asked, referencing Trump’s decision that triggered the resignation of Secretary of Defense James Mattis. “We shouldn’t go for the bold move of denuclearizing the Korean peninsula? Even on Russia … do we really yearn for the Cold War?” he wrote. “And don’t even get me started with the FBI: What? We now lionize this historically destructive institution?“ At the end of the day, Arkin seems to grasp something that is so lost on talking heads: The world is complex, and not everyone fits into perfect little boxes for convenient reporting. One can respect the military while still wanting to use it sparingly. Trump might not be either a perfect hero or an evil villain, but rather someone who saw the country slipping into malaise and wanted to do something about it. The fact that Arkin no longer feels like he fits in at NBC News shows just how detached from reality it and other networks have become. When a widely respected reporter feels he needs to leave because he won’t parrot pre-packaged narratives, something is terribly wrong. https://www.westernjournal.com/ct/army-vet-departs-nbc-trashes-network-farewell-letter/