Real Journalism: People Investigating

Ilona Meagher doesn't have a degree in journalism (although she is working on one, even though she's already proven that she doesn't need one), but she's far ahead of all those D.C. stenographers who wouldn't know a scoop if they were ordering a cone in an ice cream store. As a self-starter, former flight attendant, she has become one of the national experts on the epidemic of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome among our GIs returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

What started as an area of personal interest became a vital book on a major problem facing our combat veterans (which of course the Busheviks would prefer to ignore), Moving a Nation to Care: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and America's Returning Troops.

After interviewing Meagher, we recently met her at the Yearly Kos conference in Chicago. She's enthusiastic, impassioned, immersed in her subject matter, and enormously knowledgeable about what she writes about. Now, isn't that what you would expect of a mainstream journalist, let's say, writing for the Washington Post on national issues, but don't get?

If our media is going to be reformed and restructured to remove it from the narrow corporate frame of the mainstream media, which keeps so many issues out of the news because they might make the powers that be punish them by cutting back on tax breaks or not granting favorable regulations, it will come from citizen journalists like Ilona Meagher.

As we noted in our review of Meagher's book:

Like wounded Iraqis, GIs with PTSD are just so much collateral damage to the White House.

What makes Moving a Nation to Care particularly significant is that it is grounded in personal accounts of how many GIs with PTSD arrived at where they are. This is a well-researched book that combines facts, details and personal accounts into a compelling call for assisting our own victims of a fraudulent war.

Ilona Meagher truly supports our troops and cares about their well-being as they return to a country for which the Iraq War has been more faux jingistic sloganeering than real combat.

Unlike Bush, Cheney and the self-serving pro-war, pandering GOP candidates for president, Meagher identified an injustice done to our troops and has sought to do something about it with the power of the pen.

That, our friends, is a true patriot.

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