Samuel Mudd, who treated the broken leg of John Wilkes Booth in 1865, after the latter shot Abraham Lincoln in the head and then jumped down to the stage of the Ford Theater and shouted, "Sic semper tyrannis!", had children whose descendants try still to clear their ancestor's name.  Mudd was arrested as a conspirator in the assassination plot and spent years at a prison on the Dry Tortugas, an island chain near the Florida Keys.  The lack of fresh water made those islands "dry."  Mudd's
skills as a physician came in handy during his stay there.  In the early 1930s, a very good Hollywood film called The Prisoner of Shark Island was made, depicting Mudd's selfless efforts at healing his fellow man.
     On Saturday, July 25, 2015, Fox News Channel aired a story about Mudd's descendants, showing them gathering for what looked like a family reunion on a touring boat, with a visit to old buildings at some tropical location.
     The Fox newsman speaking over the footage said, "I don't know where they're supposed to be..."
     I thought, Have you considered doing research before you air the story?  Could you call the Mudd descendants and ask them about the footage, among other interesting facts about the ancestor they're trying to convert from infamous to famous?
     Cable news programs often show imagery the anchors and pundits probably wouldn't be able to identify, at least as to the images' origins.  How many times have we seen training footage of al-Qaeda junior terrorists in ski masks working with monkey bars and other playground equipment?  War on Terror footage shown on the three U.S. cable news networks is remarkably sparse.  The Defense Department provides footage filtered by their censors to the public here, avoiding anything bloody.  No civilian corpses.  No combat footage depicting its real nastiness.  An image shown thousands of times in recent years on cable news depicts a soldier throwing a grenade over a wall, a truly long hurl, like a centerfielder arcing a ball to the catcher.  War as baseball.
     How much do newscasters in our freedom of information country know about what's going on in the war zones?  Like the repeating shot of terrorists on monkey bars, did anyone watching that or broadcasting it know where that footage was shot?  It was used here to make us feel uneasy, like all footage provided by the Defense Department of enemies of the U.S., most of whom wear black masks, supplying their own villainous headgear.
     Samuel Mudd's story is of a man quite possibly falsely accused.  He provided aid to a man who had recently assassinated the President of the United States.  Did he know about Booth beforehand?  Could he break the Hippocratic Oath and not treat a man in great pain?  His exemplary and heroic conduct on Shark Island should be noted by any newsman or -woman talking about Mudd and his descendants' efforts to clear his name.  The Fox News ignoramus didn't make the connection between an image of Mudd's descendants and an old-looking building interior plus tropical waters, meaning he's probably looking at Samuel Mudd's prison location.
     A likely innocent person held prisoner by the U.S. government in a Caribbean location.  Imagine that.

                                                                               Vic Neptune