Readers Attack, Defend Military Analyst Lightbody and Profile

I was gratified to read your article about Lightbody. The piece was well researched, highly detailed and you displayed creditable restraint in your portrait of a charlatan. I have been deeply concerned by Lightbody’s posing as a military specialist. Your last paragraph carries the most important message: the miserable lack of quality assurance for certain kinds of journalists.

News organizations rely on doctors for medical articles and lawyers for legal columns. Veterinarians write the pages of the pet section. Consequently, those subjects usually are treated with scholarship and accuracy. Those same organizations permit non-aviators to write about aircraft accidents and publish stories about military matters written by college-dropout draft dodgers.

Print and broadcast media should expect the same quality of credentials for military or aviation analysts as they do from medical and legal writers. Military and aeronautical subjects are every bit as complex and dynamic, requiring equivalent academic standards and experience.

I was (and continue to be) offended and wrathful that an impostor was misrepresenting the activities of the services and getting paid (liberally, according to your article) for his masquerade. If Fox TV prefers opportunistic, greedy pretenders over well-qualified, knowledgeable reporters, it goes a long way toward explaining the mediocrity of their programming.

Men and women in many highly technical or esoteric fields have a well-founded, justifiable distrust of reporters. I have an idealistic visualization of a time when that distrust is ameliorated by the assignment of truly qualified writers to “cover” military and aerospace matters. The opportunity is there, and the infamy of Lightbody’s disgraceful pretense could be the catalyst that drives the reaction to completion.

G.A. YORK

Santa Ana