The CBS news magazine 60 Minutes reported on brain trauma among US veterans after their tours of duty in war zones. With no sense of irony, Sharyn Alfonsi, the CBS correspondent, linked such battle trauma to pro football players whose brain autopsies have revealed similar damage. There is no known cure now.
“Since 9/11 over 300,000 soldiers have returned home with brain injuries,” she told viewers. “Researchers fear the impact of CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) could cripple a generation of warriors.”
A progressive reporter could balance such pro-war language with sources such as Kathy Kelly of Voices. She would likely note the obvious. Remove the risk of CTE to US servicepersons by ending US military operations abroad. Instead, the CBS report focused laser-like on brain injuries to American soldiers from explosive blasts in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The 60 Minutes correspondent did not mention the pioneering CTE and football research by the Nigerian-born Dr. Bennet Omalu, who Will Smith portrayed in the 2016 film Concussion. In Dr. Omalu’s memoir, Truth Doesn’t Have a Side: My Alarming Discovery about the Danger of Contact Sports, he writes that football players at the positions of center, guard and tackle can experience dozens of head blows that injure brain cells, irreversibly, during a single game. A high school football season can be 10 games long. Do the math.
Dr. Omalu’s 2002 brain autopsy of “Iron” Mike Webster, center for the Pittsburgh Steelers’ four-time Super Bowl champions in the 1970s and ’80s, dead at age 50, revealed a trauma to tau protein, which supports and transports nutrients to and from brain cells and fiber. On that front, I give credit where it is due.
The 60 Minutes report on CTE and military veterans did a fine job of explaining this degenerative brain process. It features tau protein changes in the brain, a harmful development. Symptoms include memory loss and mood swings.
At the VA-Boston University-Concussion Legacy Foundation Brain Bank, CBS correspondent Alfonsi interviewed Dr. Ann McKee, a neuropathologist, involved with research on head trauma and CTE. In a lab with hundreds of brains, Dr. McKee showed how brains with CTE, not easy viewing.
Critically, though, Alfonsi’s reporting simply sidesteps the socio-economic conditions that compel poor and working-class Americans to join the military and put them at-risk for CTE in the first place. Changing the social conditions for military members would be a way to provide other job choices than enlisting in a branch of the service for one or more tours of duty. This is the most effective way to protect soldiers from brain injuries, plain as day.
In the big picture, antiwar Americans such as Kathy Kelly and her allies at Voices for Creative Nonviolence have long connected the National Football League’s ties to the military-industrial complex. Examples range from halftime shows with military jets flying over stadiums to TV recruiting commercials aimed at youth and sportscasters’ praise of war and warriors. Mass media bias make war seem inevitable, a little like the rising sun. How? In the case above, a 60 Minutes reporter uses a kind of tunnel vision in her coverage of brain injuries, the US military and NFL.
Seth Sandronsky lives and works in Sacramento. He is a journalist and member of the Pacific Media Workers Guild. Email sethsandronsky@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, October 15, 2018
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