Hoo, boy, did the legacy media really have President Donald Trump and his policies dead to rights this time.
On Thursday, readers began seeing photos of meals being served to U.S. service members serving in the Middle East being posted on social media, and they were brutal. They made Michelle Obama’s school lunches look good.
The photos were first published by USA Today, under an article titled, “Cookies, deodorant, socks. Iran war puts military packages in limbo.”
From that piece, by Cybele Mayes-Osterman:
Dan F. was alarmed when his daughter, a Marine aboard the USS Tripoli, a warship deployed to fight the Iran war, sent him a photo of a meal served on the ship. A lunch tray, two-thirds empty, carried one small scoop of shredded meat and a single folded tortilla.
A picture of a mid-April dinner on the USS Abraham Lincoln, shared by a service member with his family, was similarly unappetizing – a small handful of boiled carrots, a dry meat patty and a gray slab of processed meat.
Dan and other military family members worried that their loved ones deployed to the Middle East are going hungry are filling boxes with items they hope could help service members ride out prolonged deployments in the Middle East – homemade fudge, Jolly Ranchers, crossword puzzle books, playing cards, toothpaste, Girl Scout cookies and fresh socks. But mail delivery to military ZIP codes across the Middle East has been indefinitely suspended as of April, and packages in transit now hang in limbo.
It didn’t take long for these photos to circulate, posted by other journalists and liberals. (And yes, I do repeat myself, again.)
Here’s one from Evan Hill of The Washington Post, who noted that the report quoted a sailor as telling his mother that rations “are going to get really low” and “morale is going to be at an all-time low.”
Images of food being served to sailors on the USS Abraham Lincoln and USS Tripoli, published by USA Today.
Supplies “are going to get really low” and “morale is going to be at an all-time low,” one sailor messaged his mother: https://t.co/di0KUEohvI pic.twitter.com/ZcuBNw1k8i
— Evan Hill (@evanhill) April 16, 2026
There was a certain radical credulousness at work in all of this: The U.S. military, effectively built to survive war with the world’s great powers — China! Russia! North Korea! (if you want to count them) — was scraping by on virtually nothing because a few stray Iranian drones were managing to find their way into the Strait of Hormuz, or something.
The problem with posting these pictures on social media, however, is that viewers get to examine them in fuller context — which users did, calling out fatal credibility issues in how this was being presented:
They cropped out a tray. pic.twitter.com/1x8PoaShKp
— DemoncratsAreEvil (@DemoncratsREviI) April 17, 2026
As a former sailor of the USNavy who lived on board ships for many years of my life. I call pure BS clickbait.
— MrTommy (@TeflonTommy2) April 17, 2026
Having a hubby that served for 20 yrs and was aboard 3 different carriers, I can tell you for a fact this post is full of crap. Sailors eat phenomenally well. This post is for those who are very naive and just plain dumb.
— limabi75 (@limabi75) April 17, 2026
And some users pointed out that context means everything.
Looks like midrats (midnight rations for night shift/those who were off the ship during dinner). It’s usually some leftovers from dinner served to the crew earlier. We got down to only PB&J on midrats, but dinner was still regular quality and portions.
— jdlokk (@jdlokk1) April 17, 2026
Remember, it wasn’t that long ago that liberals were criticizing Secretary of War Pete Hegseth for feeding the troops too well.
Look, it’s no secret that military food is not Spago, or even Chipotle. It’s, well, edible and nutritive. I’ve never heard those who are served it describe it as anything more, but I’ve also never heard them describe it as less. To quote Noah Wylie’s character in “A Few Good Men,” it’s “three squares a day.”
Also, you can watch how these meals are prepared onboard America’s largest aircraft carrier, again thanks to social media:
And most of USA Today’s piece had to do with the hold-up of care packages, something that a curator at the Smithsonian National Postal Museum, Lynn Heidelbaugh, said happens in times of conflict.
“There are always extenuating circumstances,” she said. “It’s far more complex than domestic mail.”
United States Postal Service historian Steve Kochersperger confirmed this.
“Interruptions and delays in mail service have been a part of every American conflict since the Revolutionary War. Communications and supply networks that work well during peacetime are invariably disrupted during wartime,” he told the paper, citing the “tremendous backlog of mail following the D-Day invasion of 1944.”
“Non-expedited shipping of packages to the Middle East usually takes up to 24 days, the Postal Service says. In 2003, mail took an average 11 to 14 days to reach service members deployed to the Iraq war, according to a Government Accountability Office report,” the piece noted.
So this is basically a nuanced piece of some length about care packages being held up, and the media’s takeaway on the socials was … our troops are starving because Iran has brought us to our knees, somehow? Even though they hadn’t, and the pictures were misleading, and context was denuded, but whatever. Starving troops, hear it here first!
I have not kept count of how many pieces I have had to end — this year alone, even! — with my amazement at the legacy media’s amazement that we have so little trust in them. At this point, it’s beginning to feel like a hack’s crutch. And yet, the amazement does continue: I stare anew, agog, at a screen from institutions begging for our trust as they find new and novel ways to lie that social media can debunk in hours, if not minutes.
If you want to find out about the logistics of care packages during times of conflict, read the USA Today piece in its entirety. I’m not sure it’s wholly believable and it certainly isn’t without obvious slant, but it’s not reprehensible journalism in and of itself.
If you want to find out how the men and women of our U.S. Armed Forces are eating, do not rely on selectively edited pictures that came out of an article about something else entirely, flogged by a WaPo apparatchik that had zero to do with the original piece and either didn’t absorb the gist of it or thought you lacked the attention span to realize he was misrepresenting it.
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