Shame on the news media for their coverage of journalist deaths vs. troop deaths

[BenGarrett]

We lied.

For months, the media has been giving Americans the impression that we
no longer hear the names of American military casualties on the evening
news or in the morning paper because there have been so many deaths in
Iraq that Joe American has become desynthesized.

After 1,000 deaths, or 1,500 deaths or 2,000 deaths, the shock value,
the anger value, the sympathy value was lost on viewers and readers. As
2003 rolled into 2004 and 2004 into 2005, the average American stopped
giving a second thought to the latest Iraqi casualty.

We've all sat in newsrooms, behind our desks, and told grieving mothers
or well-meaning friends through the telephone that their son's or
friend's death didn't warrant more coverage on the front page or at the
top of the newscast because it simply wasn't considered top-of-the-news
by the most important of our critics, our customers.

We lied.

Monday's car bombing of a CBS television crew in Baghdad proved
something: The press wasn't bored with reporting deaths in Iraq. The
press was bored with reporting military deaths in Iraq. We were
too busy speculating about whether the economy was as good as it seems,
the real reasons behind rising gas prices, and a possible Democrat
landslide in November to care about the Plight of the American Soldier. Oh, we have devoted a lot of minutes and column inches to the war in Iraq. But we've mostly been focusing on whether it has become a quagmire, or how our troops are losing favor with the Iraqi people. But to let the American people know that the young lance corporal killed yesterday was an American with dreams and aspirations who sacrificed all in service to his country? That became a thing of the past shortly after President Bush declared victory in Iraq. Desynthesized, you see. No longer a worthy topic, you understand.

But when two CBS staffers were killed and a third critically injured, the news was suddenly awash with their plight. We indulged in those precious air minutes and column inches with the wanton gluttony of a kid in a candy store. The well-formed callouses towards death on the conscience of America suddenly ceased to exist. The desynthesization became moot.

If you don't know that the names of the journalists killed in Baghdad were Paul Douglas and Jamese Brolan, and that the correspondent injured was Kimberly Dozier, then you haven't been close to a television or picked up a newspaper in 24 hours. They were "driven by passion." They were "friends to many." They "will be missed." Their life stories are being told on the airwaves and written about on the printed pages at media outlets from the Pacific to the Atlantic.

And that's fine.

But when the story of journalists being killed is beamed into our homes at dinner time and tossed onto our front stoop at breakfast time while the only mention of the name of the latest soldier to die is limited to the "List of Iraqi Combat Deaths" on CNN's or the Washington Post's website, something is amiss.

Quick, what was the name of the U.S. soldier who was killed in the same car bomb attack as the CBS journalists? Did you even know that a U.S. soldier was killed in that attack?

Unfortunately, as I scoured my Internet news sources on Tuesday afternoon, I could find little mention of that apparently-unimportant soldier who died alongside the journalists. It wasn't until an article in the Detroit Free Press that I even found mention of the soldier's death. And they didn't tell his name.

The Men's News Daily (California) touted the "deadly profession." You think? Put up the laptop, don some kevlar and take the gunner's position on the Humvee, and then let's talk deadly profession. But the Men's News Daily didn't bother to mention much about the soldier who died. A Reuters story detailed the fact that journalism casualties in Iraq have topped World War II. But they didn't mention the soldier, either. NPR even had the gumption to claim that journalists who lose their lives in combat zones are no less valuable than troops who are killed in combat. Oh, and their mention of the fatally wounded soldier was also scarce.

Is the killing of journalists in Iraq newsworthy? Absolutely. They were killed doing their job, just like our soldiers. They are Americans with families, dreams and aspirations, just like our soldiers. And, albeit in an entirely different context and on a much different scale, journalists are defending the American people in their own way. But when a U.S. soldier losing his life in combat becomes a mere afterthought to a journalist losing his life? That's a travesty, and it becomes no wonder that the popularity of the reporter has been reduced to somewhere between used car salesmen and politicians among American culture.

I've never been ashamed of voicing my opinion that America's mainstream media has lost its focus. The New York Times, the Washington Posts, the CNNs . . . those guys no longer reflect the hard-earned style that their predecessors in front of the presses on America's main streets worked to develop. And as a result, they've shattered the trust of the American public who once relied faithfully on the news media to bring them "all the news that's fit to print."

But until now, I was convinced that this alarming trend was limited to the mainstream news media. I was convinced that I could pick up a hometown newspaper or flip on an evening newscast from my hotel room in suburban America and see true-to-the-core, hard-nosed, gritty journalists still working in the style that the newspaper men of the early 1900s would have been proud of.

Given the coverage today, however, I'm afraid that I was wrong. Right now, more than ever, I'm humiliated to be a journalist and a member of the news media. Today represents a new low in an industry that had seemed to have sunk into the gutters of professional decency.

Shame on us.

[kevin1]

I caught a small glimpse of the CBS news this evening , and I remembered why I don't watch network tv anymore . They were all aglow expounding about some "fearless" female journalist , completely ignoring everything else that was going on around them . Good gawd , now they think they're the news ! [:@]

[Allegheny]

Good post Ben, PBS and CNN still usually present the photos and names of those killed in Iraq and Afganistan. Our soldiers and Marines are all young vibrant young people that are caught in an impossible situation with a murky mission to perform. We have won the war, "mission accomplished", now we have to win the peace.