This was an excellent bit of propaganda for the newspaper that had been a part of my life during my time in the military. I highly recommend it to all vets.
Like I remember the newspaper, this documentary on The Stars and Stripes is all gung-ho, yay rah, and shouts of U-S-A U-S-A! I suppose that I should preface this by admitting that although I did serve honorably in the Untied States military, it was in the Air Force. We actually had maids when I was in training school. No joke. The food in the mess halls was better than you get in lots of decent restaurants. On top of that, the three years I spent at my duty station were in Athens, Greece, and I had a two-bedroom penthouse apartment overlooking the Saronic Gulf islands. Don't hate me.
The Stars and Stripes was as much a part of my life back then as anyone serving in the military. The difference was that I read a lot of other stuff, too. I had subscriptions to The Atlantic, Harpers, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, and I picked up the Herald Tribune very often, so I wasn't relying on the SS for my news. For most of the people in my social circle, the newspaper was mainly to get our dose of Bloom County, Calvin and Hobbes, and The Far Side comics. No joke. We lived for those.
I didn't follow U.S. sports when I lived overseas, and didn't care. I never remember the S&S being my go-to source for news. I never really trusted it, to be truthful. The good news is that I didn't have to because I got my news elsewhere. However, this was the mid-1980s and before the internet or telephones, so the S&S was a good way to feel connected to...something. When I say "before phones" I'm speaking of Greece at this time when almost none of my friends had a phone at home, as crazy as that sounds today. In my three years in Greece, I called home maybe 3-4 times, tops. I wrote letters to my mother and no one else. It was a different era, definitely.
With all that said, I still read it, cover-to-cover almost every day (usually on company time). I even read the jerk-off right-wing columnists that I despised (know your enemy).
As far as the Brian Williams scandal goes, that wasn't a scoop, as they say in the film. It was a completely stupid and unimportant detail of a TV star whom we should have never venerated in the first place. He reads the news. So what?
To my knowledge, SS never reported much on the multi-billion dollar scandals of the various weapons systems that never worked. The B1 Bomber was the biggest piece of crap ever imagines (until the F35, that is) yet I don't remember SS ever covering this story.
