At BBC,
a beautiful story of a life. And a death.
A soldier, Maj. Matthew Bacon, killed by a roadside bomb at approximately 11.00 (0815 BST) on Sunday, the 95th combat casualty suffered by British troops in Iraq.
Maj. Bacon worked at Shaibah base, about 10 miles south-west of Basra, the British logistics headquarters in Iraq. Earlier this month two British soldiers were also killed by a roadside bomb near the base.
What's beautiful about this story is that it's on the BBC web site. The guy's picture is there. You can glimpse a small bit of who he was, and you can judge what kind of sacrifices we are making to drive General Electric common stock back to its pre-Sept. 11 level and support Halliburton's high-flying (tripled since Sept. 11).
Try to imagine a CNN web site, an MSNBC web site, hell, a USAToday web site with a plain, simple, factual story like this about any one of our fellow Americans who are dying over there -- nine yesterday?
Try to imagine O'Rielly pausing to acknowledge the brave men and women who died for him just yesterday.
So my question is, why isn't our American news media busy making heroes out of our fallen soldiers the way it makes heroes out of missing blond teenagers and brain-dead daughters of southwest Florida Republicans?
The most logical answer is that we consumers aren't demanding it. Not loudly enough, or effectively enough.
I remember a whole lot more personal details about Sept. 11 victims -- and there were a lot more of them than military casualties. So far, anyway.
There's an argument that the families of the fallen desire privacy. Certainly, if it were my family, we would demand privacy and angrily defend any invasion of it, so desire for privacy is a royal flush in my book.
But that runs counter to what we know about us American people. Not long ago, more Americans tuned into one live TV broadcast of American Idol than voted in both of the past two presidential elections.
As a culture, we Americans crave whatever form of legitimacy we imagine is bestowed by media attention. A disproportionate number of Americans will flash our breasts to strangers, fire off stupid dKos diaries or eat worms on national TV in order to effect some higher level of our own remembrance.
So to accept that all of the families of the fallen desire privacy, I'd have to accept that military families are substantially different from most of the rest of us. Certainly, there are differences -- all adult males in my family have long hair, for example. Only the tiniest percentage of us dKos community members has experienced the tragic loss of a family member in military combat.
But I don't think that's the case. I think our American news media has been bullied into suppressing coverage of our military casualties.
Most of our troops believe they are dying for us. How can any American consciously ignore such a sacrifice? How can our military send home a body without making an effort to extol that human being's virtues and promise to any who might listen?
The should be hiring Armstrong Williams or Geraldo to produce sensitive video retrospectives for every one of our dead soldiers.
The fact that they are not makes them seem duplicitous. Let's see... government... duplicitous... nah!
That our national news media would abet this sleight-of-hand is a dereliction of its first and highest duty, and damnable.