Roosters hadn’t even shaken their tail-feathers, forget the cockadoodle-dooing, before the first hoot of objection to The Courier-Journal’s Oct. 26 front page hit my virtual mailbox. The 5:57 a.m. e-mail read:
“Congratulations on your . . . ‘celebratory’ headline on the 2,000 U.S. soldier death in Iraq. Maybe you all should dress up as Grim Reapers instead of your other suggestions last week. …”
Which was quickly followed by another:
“Good headline traiter [sic] … next time the enemy strikes, the blood will be on your and others’ hands who use these anti-war tactics without thought on what support you give our enemies!”
Celebratory?
Blood on our hands?
Supporting the enemy?
Did they read the front page that was in my mailbox around rooster time that morning?
The main headline on that page reflected a major milestone reached the day before: “2,000 American lives lost.” The preceding lines read: “On March 20, 2003, the U.S. military campaign in Iraq began. Forty-two days later, President Bush declared an end to major combat operations. U.S. deaths in Iraq hit 1,000 on Sept. 7, 2004. Yesterday, that figure doubled.”
The photograph with the headline showed a headstone for a soldier named Timothy James Roark, who died in Iraq on Oct. 2.
Beneath the photo, the start of an Associated Press story about the milestones, a fact box containing information about the deaths (224 21-year-olds killed; 31 dead from Kentucky, 46 dead from Indiana, and other sad statistics); and references to profiles of local soldiers killed in the war, and stories about the Iraqi dead and final results about the passage of the Iraqi constitution, inside the main news section.
A pretty complete roundup, I thought, of a moment reached in a war that was losing support at home as deaths mounted abroad.
But I heard from several other readers throughout the day who, like my early-morning writers, also believed the newspaper had chosen to spotlight death of Americans instead of liberation of Iraqis. They believed the newspaper’s bias was showing. Several of them referred to a still-rankling Oct. 17 headline — “Passing constitution won’t end Iraq’s woes” — that had accompanied the Page One story about the voters’ historic approval of the draft. They, and other readers I heard from, didn’t think the newspaper gave that occasion its due with that headline.
But the bigger picture regarding the criticism of the Oct. 26 coverage has to do with an old predicament, two sides of one terrible coin:
You honor the dead by acknowledging them.
You dishonor the dead by displaying them.
In the history of this war, there’s plenty of evidence that the Bush administration wanted to stay away from photos of flag-draped coffins returning to American soil. Proponents of that policy spoke of honoring the dead by shielding them, and for a long time, the news media complied with that blackout. Some — like me — suspected other reasons for shielding the fallen. (Or, more recently, for feeding scripted lines and stage instructions to soldiers to be “interviewed” by the President.)
More evidence cropped up last week, when in advance of the 2,000-dead milestone, a U.S. military spokesman e-mailed reporters: “The 2,000 service members killed in Iraq supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom is not a milestone. It is an artificial mark on the wall set by individuals or groups with specific agendas or ulterior motives.”
I found the quote in a story that appeared in Editor & Publisher, which recounted how top newspapers in the country did acknowledge the number and the milestone.
But it wasn’t only mega-major newspapers.
There’s a fascinating feature on the Freedom Forum’s Web site that features hundreds of front pages of newspapers around the country and the world on any given day. You can find those pages by going to www.newseum.org.
I took a trip there on Wednesday to look at front pages from around the country. Given the reaction from some readers of The C-J, I wanted to see how in or out of step this newspaper might have been with other papers in both red and blue states.
Most front pages I looked at had some mention — prominent or otherwise — of the 2,000 in news stories and headlines. Some did more than carry a story: The Savannah Morning News printed the names of the dead on its front page. (The editorial page of The Atlanta Constitution printed an editorial cartoon by Mike Luckovich, in which he spelled out the name of every dead U.S. soldier in the shape of the letters W H Y.) The Journal Review in Crawfordsville, Ind., printed the names of that state’s dead in the shape of Indiana. Only a few papers had no front-page mention. And several newspapers emphasized the constitution story in their Iraq coverage, or split the coverage between the two Iraq issues.
While there was nothing wrong with The C-J’s selection or presentation of this news — and I wonder if the people who protested the front page even bothered to read the wonderful stories about the local soldiers and their families that were printed the same day — perhaps, in retrospect, the paper could have, and should have, given more front-page attention to the approval of the constitution. Without, of course, sacrificing any space or attention to the Americans who have given their lives in the war.
The Virginian-Pilot printed this main headline, “In Iraq, two milestones,” and followed it with sub headlines about the constitution and the 2,000 U.S. deaths. Portions of both stories played on the front page. I thought that was an elegant, and powerful, way to present the paradox of the news coming out of the war.
Finally, I wanted to see, historically, how The Courier-Journal had presented the deaths of U.S. soldiers in other wars. In between phone calls from outraged readers, I read at least seven dozen obituaries of young men from Louisville who had died in 1968 in the Vietnam War. Almost 40 years ago, this newspaper had paid tribute to those fallen soldiers, and put names and faces to the dead, in that war.
So, in its coverage on Oct. 26, this newspaper was not only doing its job, it was honoring its own tradition of remembering the dead.
There is great shame, I think, in doing any less for our sons and daughters, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, who die in war.
But others, of course, do not agree. For them, I offer one more headline I saw on one of those Oct. 26 pages:
“Iraq: It all depends on how you look at it.”
