Well, here we are. We have advanced to the Holy Day in this week and are feeling satisfied with the accomplishment. We noted successful. sustained respiration through all the other days, and we are confident in our ability to move forward. Thankfully there is no work out there lurking to be accomplished.

We are thankful we don’t have Trey Yingst’s job. He has, to some degree, become the face of one of the wars in progress. You see him above making a statement on Fox about Gaza. He is actually in Gaza, which is a job only somewhat related to ones we had as a group. In this one, he has heard the “all clear” and is giving us full photogenic access to the special military operation.

We could have seen it much closer right here from Arlington. There were thousands in the streets of America’s cities yesterday. We watched in some amazement at that. Not that “mostly peaceful” with an exaggerated roll of the eyes isn’t becoming sort of normal. The mostly peaceful activities that went along with 2020 seemed to set a familiar tone. We are old enough to recall another period of mostly peaceful demonstrations. Ours started with Detroit in 1967 when our usually placid big city went up in flames. We were proud to set the tone of the times, since Detroit’s agonies were followed the next year- 1968- in all sorts of places.

There is a journalistic contretemps in progress as well. You might have noticed it in some of the coverage yesterday. Apparently some of the “journalists” covering the “mostly peaceful” activities were actually participants in the parts that weren’t. It was news yesterday because of the retrospective live-action coverage during the outbreak. Some of the correspondents were on-scene for the brutal killings of Israelis by the suddenly restive Palestinians. Part of this coverage meme suggested the Press contingent was embedded with the Palestinian insurgents. We don’t know where that leaves our favorite correspondent, Mr. Trey Yingst.

Trey has a screen personality that radiates preparation. Sometimes he is bare-headed, conveying a lack of immediate danger. Other times he is wearing that helmet. You know the one- it indicates there is potential hostile fire, or IED or something. The design is efficient and harks back to a much older design, one perfected by German industrialists nearly a century ago. They could not have done a better job if they had been chartered to create something that oozes menace.

Here is Trey, donning the Danger Costume, preparing to speak to pundits in Washington and New York:Inline image

And here he is, ready to encounter Danger:

You can see the element of risk and potential harm that the headgear captures nicely. But taken with the “mostly journalists” broadcasting from the front lines, or from somebody’s front lines you can see the barriers between peaceful journalists and media martyrs, right?

A word about Trey beyond the helmet. He is young, and War is a business best conducted by youth. Trey has become the face of the Gaza incursion by the Israeli Defense Forces because he was already there. No one is accusing Trey of anything in appropriate. He lives in Israel, and he was the sole correspondent who was able to get to the trouble, put on a helmet, and tell us how dangerous things were.

Trey has been at this for a while. He is just 30-years-of-age to cover this mostly peaceful war. He speaks English, Arabic, and Spanish to a fair degree, and grew up in Pennsylvania. His academic qualifications were provided by the American University School of Communication (BA). Being Boomers, we marvel at the fact that Trey has had ten years experience with increasingly visible exposure on increasingly vital topics. Yingst was arrested during the mostly peaceful protests in Ferguson over the death of Travon Martin. The ACLU managed to get that overturned, and he joined the One America News Network, where he was the network’s chief White House correspondent for 16 months during the Trump Administration.

Some of the stories from that stretch of time were disorienting. Trey was the first to report on the indictment of 13 Russian nationals, who we now know had only a tangental role in the alleged election malfeasance. He has reported from Ukraine after being recruited by Fox. Part of his resume at that point had been reporting under grenade attack as rocket whizzed in the air.

Living in Israel, he was able to get to this trouble area quickly. He worked the majority of the first 70-odd hours of violence until Fox could find all those older caucasian correspondents who were willing to take their chances to get to the trouble.

That part strikes us as a bit funny, since It is apparent that Fox has called them out of retirement and thrown them into the fray. It is like a mini-history lesson to see them mansplaining the conflict. He has journalistic credentials on the ground Gaza, Ukraine, Rwanda, and Uganda. He then joined One America News Network, where he was the network’s chief White House correspondent for 16 months. During his time there, he covered the Trump administration’s four year battle with the other networks. While there, he was the first to report on major stories like the indictment of 13 Russian nationals and the plans of Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi to meet with President Trump.

The helmet addition to his wardrobe has been effective even if it is a little evocative of other wars resolved before he was born. The way things are progressing, with the IDF driving into Gaza, the Russians and Ukrainians deadlocked in Eastern Europe, and the Chinese stirring up the South China Sea.

The way we work it now is to keep the volume down on the flatscreen to avoid upsetting the crowd. If Trey is wearing the helmet, we might turn up the sound. If he is bareheaded, we know it is only a retrospective and pay no attention. That is the new criteria we apply to journalism. It saves a lot of time!

Copyright 2023 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com