Leadership Quote by Joe Scarborough

A neat little rhetorical trap is being set here: if the press reports grim realities about a war, it isnt documenting events, its rooting against the people fighting it. Scarboroughs line doesnt argue with any specific coverage; it preemptively delegitimizes the very act of negative reporting by recasting it as appetite, even addiction. "Cant print enough" is the tell. It implies excess and hunger, as if journalists are gorging on tragedy for profit or ideology.

The intent is political triage. By wrapping critique of the media in protective language about "our troops", the speaker borrows the moral authority of service members to shield policymakers and the mission itself from scrutiny. If bad news equals bad faith, then skepticism becomes disloyalty. The subtext is a demand for a narrow kind of patriotism: not support for soldiers as human beings, but support for a narrative in which setbacks are minimized and dissent is suspect.

Context matters because this kind of phrasing thrives during wartime or national-security flashpoints, when publics are anxious and leaders need cohesion. It taps a long-running conservative argument that "mainstream media" forms an adversarial class with its own political agenda. The move is clever because it collapses distinctions: between troops and commanders, between criticism and contempt, between accountability and attack. Its also risky; it pressures journalists toward boosterism and pressures citizens to treat information as allegiance tests, the kind of civic atmosphere where reality becomes just another front in the conflict.