Posted on 10/20/2006 10:38:55 PM PDT by MinorityRepublican
IN a small box titled "Names of the Dead" on page 10, The New York Times recorded the passing of Captain Mark Paine this week, who died after a roadside bomb exploded near his vehicle in Iraq.
His local California newspaper, the Contra Costa Times, ran more than 700 words on Cpt Paine's death, including interviews with his mother, father and even his old Scoutmaster, while the San Francisco Chronicle ran a 500-word obituary.
This local coverage of US military deaths "actually has a bigger affect on public opinion than the overall trends," said Matt Baum, an associate professor of politics at the University of California, Los Angeles.
But with the US military death toll hitting 2787 today, analysts said even local media coverage struggles to overcome the numbing affect of the steady flow of deaths.
"In Iraq, certainly while we were losing relatively small numbers of soldiers early on, I think that was a huge shock," said Max Boot, a senior fellow of national security studies at the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations.
"But now that it's kind of accumulated it doesn't have as much of a shock value. This is reminiscent of (Soviet dictator Joseph) Stalin's phrase about how 'one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.' There's some truth to that."
Mr Boot and Mr Baum both said threshold moments - like the US death toll reaching a key figure - garner the greatest media coverage, but the spotlight on Iraq was likely to burn a little brighter now because of the impending US congressional elections on November 7.
"You have got a heated election campaign underway and you are going to have lots of candidates highlighting it again and again and again," Mr Baum said.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.com.au ...
But with the US military death toll hitting 2787 today, analysts said even local media coverage struggles to overcome the numbing affect of the steady flow of deaths.
I don't understand what this article is trying to say. We know we're in a war; we know our military - and therefore all of us - will suffer casualties in a war; we know we can't just cut-and-run and hide under our beds because some magic "number" is reached. We also know "affect" is misused in this article - it should be "effect" in both places, and therefore we know this writer isn't all that familiar with the English language. Other than that, we don't know much of anything from this article.
I think we know this writer is wanting to garner anti-war sentiment by using the numbers of dead U.S. soldiers to bolster his ideology of anti-war rhetoric.
I pretty much assumed that, since it's the Guardian. Weren't they the outfit that encouraged their readers to send letters to voters in Ohio, urging them to vote for Kerry? The responses by the Ohio voters to the letter writers were some of the funniest things I've ever read - such as "we whipped your a**es over 200 years ago to make you stop telling us what to do; don't think you can start up again now." Loved it.
Americans also know that we lose more people in traffic accidents every month than we've lost in the entire Iraq war. Many of those deaths in traffic accidents are preventable and yet there is no outcry from Democrats and the liberal media to "stop the carnage on our highways." Federal highway spending is still spread evenly throughout the country rather than spending highway dollars first to improve the safety of the most dangerous, heavily traveled urban highways.
Obviously this joker thinks were still operating under the pre-9/11 paradigm, in which you kill 19 of us and our political leadership runs away.
And, MORE die in ONE precinct of Los Angeles than in the Iraq war . . . routinely.
Sounds like the media's ghoulish and obsessive body counts and their nothing but negative coverage on Iraq is backfiring and having the opposite intended effect by causing people to intentionally or unintentionally tune out the daily bad news litany put out by the agendized media. I suppose the media will now start mixing in some good news realizing people stop feeling the freezing water at some point when that's all you're pouring on them. You're more likely to notice the cold when you've got hot and cold being poured on you.
Was just watching the Military Channel. The Battle for Iwo Jima cost over 5,000 American and 20,000 Japanese soldiers' lives. That was just one of many battles. God bless our men and women who defend us everyday, and God d*mn these liberal asshats with an agenda to undermine our war efforts. Every life is sacred, and the US has free over 50,000,000 people with (relatively) little loss of Allied lives. Treasonous liberal bastards. When the Islamofascists come here to kill our civilians, I not sure who we should shoot first, the terrorists, or the CNN-type terrorist enabler uselful idiots.
I fiercely AGREE STRONGLY WITH YOU.
And would be honored to fight beside you any day.
God be with you and yours.
IIRC, the battle for Okinawa was even worse: over 10,000 US soldiers and Marines killed in action. I saw some color film shot during the Okinawa battle and I couldn't believe how costly our tactics were at the start of that battle. Infantry men would just run up a big hill and fire on the enemy while being shot at by snipers from three directions. They needed tanks and armored vehicles badly and I think they finally got them a week later, but that was too late for a lot of men.
Yeah, well, it's a lot less "numb" when you know the guy who's been killed, I can attest to that. We had a PSG killed in my company a couple of months ago. It's not something that you numb to easily, I can tell you that.
A lot of tactics up until at least Vietnam were costly and stupid. Reading about some of the idiocy that would prevail in tactical execution makes me think that Soldiers, back then, were little more than chess pieces to be discarded. How sickening.
Problem is, they didn't succeed in throwing the 2004 election and since then they've cynically used casualty stories so much they aren't having much effect on 2006. So, for the umpteenth time the left overplayed its hand and is p.o.'d about it.
Please don't misunderstand me, there have been very sensitive and very well done stories about the sacrifices our men and women at arms have made in defending us in the war on terror - one particularly good one in the Rocky Mountain News. But I get so tired of the left using those sacrifices in their body count journalism trying to drive their anti-war agenda. Nice to see the Guardian thinks its backfiring on them.
Talk about hyperbole.
2,787 = 1,000,000 using the Al Gore modern liberal arts math method.
Of course it's going to hurt if one of the 2787 is a loved one, a nephew, son, daughter or spouse. But it would hurt a hell of a lot more if the loss of a loved one was used by others to pull America's support from our loved one's brothers-in-arms as surrenderjunkies like Max Boot would like us to do.
People aren't numb becuase the casualties are high- people are numb because there are so many people in this country who simply don't perceive themselves as being affected by the war in Iraq. There are significantly large numbers of Americans who don't have any friends or relatives in the military, much less serving in Iraq, fewer still serving in places like Afghanistan. Outside of the yammering press which is ignored because it is like the a yapping chihuahua in the distance that barks for hours on end just to hear the sound of its on voice, many people wouldn't know a war is even going on.
It's hard to visualize being at war when you turn on the TV and there are weeks of discussion about one woman's disappearance in in Aruba, or days of discussion about a pervert in Thailand claiming to be the murderer in a crime over ten years old, or months of continual whining from offended Muslims and months of nagging about "torturing" prisoners with college frat pranks while what little current war coverage their is so minute in comparison and amounts to little more than a strip of not-very-informative words moving by at the bottom of the screen interrupted by commercials.
The press doesn't treat this as a war. To the press this is just an election campaign or an opportunity to lecture Americans on what the press defines as morality.
People who nag and whine continuously will be tuned out.
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