From the WSJ online:
March 3, 2004 10:01 p.m. EST
THE DAILY SCAN
By MARK INGEBRETSEN
U.S. Wounded in Iraq Deserve
More Attention, Critics Say
Amid the almost daily headlines of U.S. troops dying in Iraq, Americans aren't getting a clear picture of their wounded survivors of the battlefield, critics have long said, and they're laying the blame squarely on the way the Pentagon has been "spinning" the war to the media.
The effect of that public-relations campaign, critics say, is to hide the often-grim realities of this conflict from the American public.
According to the latest figures1 from the U.S. Department of Defense's Web site2 -- under "Current Information" at the bottom of the page -- since the start of the war in Iraq, 550 U.S. soldiers have been killed and 3,150 wounded as a result of the conflict.
Some members of the media are skeptical of even these official numbers. Last week, for example, the British TV-news Web site Channel 4.com wrote5 that over "11,000 medical evacuees have come through Andrews [Air Force Base in Maryland] in the past nine months. … Most, we suspect, from Iraq. But that's 8,000 more than the Pentagon says have been wounded there."
Tracking Americans wounded in Iraq apparently can be challenging. Unlike the highly publicized homecomings of the National Guard, Reservists, and other troops, America's "dead and wounded return to Washington in the middle of the night with no fanfare," the article said.
And a Toronto Star article said6: "In order to continue to sell an increasingly unpopular Iraqi invasion to the American people, President George W. Bush's administration sweeps the messy parts of war -- the grieving families, the flag-draped coffins, the soldiers who have lost limbs -- into a far corner of the nation's attic."
One columnist questioned what happens to America's seriously wounded soldiers after they return from Iraq. "Judging from press reports, none of these wounded ever dies," Harley Sorensen of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote7 in November. "Maybe I don't know where to look, but I haven't been able to find one single report of a soldier who died later of his or her injuries. Not one. Isn't that curious?"
At times the media has been accused of de-emphasizing what Editor and Publisher called8 "the forgotten American victims of the war: the injured, the traumatized, and the suicides." As far back as July, an E&P article9 "charged the media with providing a misleading sense of the recent U.S. death toll in Iraq. The press routinely highlights 'combat' deaths and downplays all deaths, including accidents, suicides, and other causes."
Part of the reason for this seeming inattention on the part of the media -- though it is by no means universal -- may have less to do with complicity than with a sophisticated government program of spin control.
In a column entitled "Hiding the Bad News" that he wrote for the Washington Post last November, Howard Kurtz listed10 some of the difficulties his colleagues have encountered at the hands of U.S. military officials in Iraq while attempting to pursue stories there. When those in the Bush administration "say they want the bad news put in perspective, do they really mean they don't want it reported at all?" he asks.
Spin control may be an inevitable part of any modern war. And it's easy to see why any administration might want to downplay the unpleasant reality that wars kill people -- and maim them, too. As a Wall Street Journal article11, also from November, noted: "How long will Americans put up with the rate of fatalities now being seen in Iraq? The answer may depend on whether the Bush administration can convince Americans that progress is being made there."
Some evidence suggests that Americans' patience won't last forever. A Washington Post article revealed12 that 58% of Americans believed "the number of casualties in Iraq was acceptable, with 34% saying the number was unacceptable," according to Washington Post-ABC News polling data from late March last year, just weeks into the war. "The latest results, based on interviews conducted Dec. 18-21 … indicated that those percentages have flipped, with only 33% saying the number of casualties is acceptable and 64% saying it is unacceptable."
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