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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (116828)	5/28/2005 4:16:01 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793623

Are you being wilfully obtuse? Nobody is telling the press not to report casualties! Not obtuse, I don't think. More like iconoclastic. Although I see the mantra about reporting casualties often enough. Mantras don't have a lot of nuance. The objection is to a 30 second news framework that ONLY reports casualties. Nothing else. Not mission, not strategy, not situation, nothing. Just body count. Day after day. It's not possible to explain mission and strategy in thirty seconds. About all you can fit in thirty seconds is casualties. And people will snooze or change the channel if you give the subject enough time to explain anything. Or fuss about the lack of coverage about American Idol or Michael Jackson. Facts of life. >>they have a fighting chance of getting their side of the story into the news stream. Yet, daily, when those SIGACTs are reduced into media-friendly releases, some have to wonder if they weren't very careful about what they wished for, because the easiest news to tell, in that 30-second summary, is a body count.<< I wrote the above before I read what you had pasted. It seems that you answered your own question as did I. So I'll address the part about "their side of the story." What could possibly be the other side of the story? Bomb blew up. Four died. Very sad. Next day; same as the previous day; different number. I realize that there are some people who have an appetite for a lot of coverage of this, but I doubt that there are not all that many and they can get their fill from the internet. I think that most people just want to hear about major developments and we can go months without major developments. So we get thirty seconds a day just to remind us that there's a war going on. I've come to the sad conclusion that that the people with the big appetite could not be satisfied no matter what the MSM did so why bother. There's no incentive for an outlet to "improve" because they will still get tarred with the same broad brush.