The Story the Media Forgot

I opened the morning paper one day last week and was greeted with a heartbreaking picture of a grieving couple. Their 19-year-old soldier son had died in Iraq just before his scheduled return. The caption read, "We almost had him home." Today, the Los Angeles Times featured a story about commonly-held "ramp ceremonies," where, in "reverential, dignified and almost majestic" tributes to the dead, soldiers and Marines quickly line up on runways bearing cargo planes getting ready to depart with the fallen. Journalists are not allowed to photograph these plane-side rituals. The Pentagon thinks the American public should be spared these images, and we know why. Obviously, we can't handle it. We would be too sad. We would want to stay home and cry rather than go out shopping. Oh, wait a minute; I forgot. We can't afford to go shopping anymore.

I have a suggestion for this country's newspaper editors and television station managers, who have opted to quietly abide by the wise Pentagon's rules. If they won't let you cover the funerals, cover the grieving families. Every day. Decide to put a grieving couple's picture on the front page of your papers. Every day. Their pain tells the story much more efficiently than the covered caskets. Plus, the family gets to have their child memorialized in a personal way. Or, rather than the grieving parents, you could feature a fallen soldier's picture on the front page -- every day. TV stations could decide to open each evening's broadcast with a short memorial on that day's featured fallen soldier. There are lots of ways to cover this story, people. Get creative. Show some guts. It's your job. Wake up.

Comments

[zanzig]

In Australia we receive the PBS news program with Jim Lehrer and although it is not a matter of immediate affect for me, I never turn to another program at the end, until Jim has finished the roll call of the dead. I have often thought that it is the least we owe the young ones who have been killed in the name of this unutterable dishonesty, that we bear witness to their passing. I agree that the media has been incredibly gutless otherwise in following the WH/Pentagon line and even more has dishonored the dead by doing so.

[Asandra]

Great idea although it probably wouldn't help the sale of newspapers if people had to face all that (visual) sadness everyday. I'm sure that's why newspapers don't overload their viewers with images of grief.