A couple of months ago, 15 UK troops were taken hostage in Iraq. They were eventually freed. Then I started seeing news stories about how everyone was furious because the troops were selling their personal stories to the highest bidder.
Maybe I’ve been in the US too long, but I didn’t understand what people were upset about. I still don’t.
Those troops went through a hideous ordeal. Why shouldn’t they be allowed to get money in return for telling people what it was like? If everyone can agree to give JK Rowling ten million quid for writing a bunch of guff about kids learning to be wizards, what’s the moral argument for not allowing troops to sell true stories for a sackful of cash? (I note that they even had explicit permission from the MOD to do so!)
Or maybe it was all faux outrage manufactured by the newspapers who lost out in the bidding war?
Tagged: hostages, Iraq, journalism, life, money, newspapers, troops, UK
4 Responses to ““It sucked. Can I have my £1m now?””
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May 31st, 2007 at 12:23 -0600
What I said at the time is here:
http://ewx.livejournal.com/420545.html?thread=2562753#t2562753
May 31st, 2007 at 14:21 -0600
Paraphrasing…
1. “They’re making lots of money, but dead soldiers aren’t.”
So what? Paris Hilton spends a week playing at being a rural farmer in Arkansas, and gets tens of thousands of dollars that she doesn’t need anyway; meanwhile actual full time farmers struggle to pay their mortgage. If you think money earned bears any relationship to money deserved, you’re deluded. If you want to protest that it should, there are bigger inequities you should be protesting than a bunch of hard-working soldiers making money.
2. “They’re making money out of telling people how they do their job”.
People do this all the time. Just take a look at the business category of Amazon.com and see all the books from CEOs about how they do their job, how they dealt with difficult situations, and so on. Many employers even encourage that sort of thing. IBM actively encourages employees to write articles about their work. The only difference is the nature of the job.
Doctors write opinion pieces about healthcare and get paid for it all the time. Some even have full-on secondary careers as journalists. Plenty of military people have written books and articles of a factual rather than literary nature too, and been paid for it.
May 31st, 2007 at 14:28 -0600
Don’t you mean Iran?
June 1st, 2007 at 16:22 -0600
Do I? Wow, no wonder wars start.
What idiot named them? It’s worse than Kansas and Arkansas.