Exploit the dead anyone?

The whole, keeping a running body count thing, reminds me of how Westmoreland and friends tried to measure the victory in Vietnam. Sad part about the trend in the U.S. media is that the underlying tone is less of respect and more about measuring defeat.

I should have included this in my previous post, but I did like the News Day cover. There are a lot of people out there that find a gripping story about a lost brother, father or sister and the effects of that loss more compelling than a carpet of names arranged ala Michael Moore style on the front page or a special section devoted to it.

i had the same opinion when i saw the pages-full-of-mugs and the huge-list-of-names.

overdone.

djizzle/assclowns:

Ignore the dead, anyone?

Perhaps it's better to just warn Americans that the Bushtard plans on sacrificing other people's kin in his useless, wrongheaded war.

Well all the names is better than just showing the 2,000 person like one of the tabloids in New York CIty did. As I said over at Gawker, too bad for the 1,999th person or the 2,001st person (or rather the family of) but your (child's) death wasn't significant enough.

What better way to pay respect to the dead than to point out how ludicrous it is for the US to ever have to make the number 2001.

Go talk to your nation's cabinet about respect for the LIVING over there who will SOON BE DEAD.

Can we save the same political back and forth for another board?

I didn't like it. I thought it was a pretty artificial milestone. Some places did some breakdowns that were much more interesting (and much less maudlin) looking at the rates of death and how they occurred or at the percentage of reservists used.

Most front pages would have been better served by doing something analytical rather than memorial in nature. Something that would, you know, actually serve readers.

My question is: How do you decide who gets to go in the comma?

I agree with Steve that I wish there'd have been a lot more analysis and a lot less memorials, but I stop short of calling it an artificial milestone.

I'm not the first to say this, but the proof of that, to me, lies in the conviction with which the military powers that be tried to downplay its significance.

First, we were told that the AP body count was wrong and that 2,000 had not yet died.

Then, we were told 2,000 was meaningless, and if we used it then we had a specific agenda.

Two thousand lives have been lost. Two thousand individuals are dead. And the people they were serving, in an effort to put political spin on the loss of their lives, actually CALLED THEIR DEATHS MEANINGLESS.

Does that mean I have an agenda? ... Well, yes. And that is this: The deaths of 2,000 people (and 200,000 more in the war) are not meaningless. They aren't meaningless and I don't give a rat's ass which "state color" people claim.

And can we please stop calling it a milestone? People strive for milestones. 3,000 strikeouts, 340 million in Powerball prizes. ... Until now, I hadn't seen it used to refer to tragedy.

But to me, that's why analysis, and if possible, telling a story to bring it home, rather than a tribute, would have served me better as a reader.

What's apparently been lost in it all, is that while the number has hit from all angles, and while spirited conversation such as this has taken place, the death toll has risen to at least 2,001.

Lastly, I saw all the AP images that moved in advance. It's baffling so many of us (me included) saw those as opportunities to crop them into oblivion, or cover them with type, gradients and graphics.

It's rare that AP comes through with so many images that, on their own, bring a story home. I wish we'd have just gotten the hell out of their way this time and let them do that.

I'd agree that 2,000 dead soldiers isn't a "milestone", and shouldn't be treated or named as such. Just like when the toll hit 1,000 a while back, a round number doesn't change the nature of the conflict or anything else. It's not news at all, is it?

And it IS important to show the scope of what's already happened (what it means to lose 2,000 troops to "liberate" a foreign country), but listing the names in the style of a 9-11 memorium doesn't work for me since 9-11 was a rapid series of events on one day -- and this thing looks like it keeps stretching further into the future.

As Steve and Josh said, what are we giving the reader unless we're looking ahead or telling a real, compelling story?

The Oakland Tribune and Daytona Beach News-Journal fronts seemed a little tasteless to me. The Morning News and Daily News fronts were a bit much as well.

Compliments to Newsday for a job well done. It is well-executed and somber, as it should be.

Hey folks:

I can speak only for the Savannah Morning News page (because I designed it).

First, I'll say that I agree with most comments here regarding the "phantom" milestone. This is a media ploy (for better or worse) beyond a shadow of a doubt. I raised this question before we committed to this undertaking (as did a few a other co-workers).

This sort of treatment sets a precedent too: What's the next milestone? 2,500? 3,000? Will we (and others) give it the same bold treatment? Time will tell.

Bottom line is this: Management agreed to this sort of treatment, and we were committed to doing the best job we could do with the presentation upon which we decided (that's my job as news planner and designer -- for assignments that I like and dislike). If you'll notice, the refer boxes in the center headline area point the reader inside to related stories. We also are a military town. Our audience is starkly different than most newspapers in the country. On a daily basis, we play up most Iraq stories that other papers give little or no attention to. Our readers expect it.

My only gripe with all of this is that we had a tight news space that day. I would like to have had a doubletruck inside to display the poignant information, to bring it home to readers a little better. As it stands, our wire editor, Laura McAbee did an outstanding job of pulling together as much Iraq-related information as she could to give the reader the context and information he or she needed.

And finally (since some of you probably are curious), to my knowledge only one reader has called in to complain.

I'm glad this has generated such a buzz though. :-)

The Newsday front was quite tasteful, emotional and well done.

Placing the pictures within the numbers is not. I prefer the Daily News example. It has some visual punch and is not gaudy in any way.

That said, it's an artificial milestone with a political agenda behind it, and that's wrong.

I agree that more analysis needed to be done, rather than simply playing up the numbers for morbid effect. Let's have some discussion (though not here) about all the good in Iraq and elsewhere that's come from their noble deaths.

I have to go back to the first comment on this thread, albeit by taking a different tack. I much preferred the NYT and Chic. Trib, which led with the Iraqi constitution passing and mentioning the 2000 deaths as a secondary angle. Don't get me wrong, I'm no Robert Knilands, but the go-to-town presentations on this story felt a little like design for design's sake. From a news standpoint, why is "2,000" the magic number? Why not 1,500? What about 3,000? 2,873? Just because there was a formal announcement of the 2,000 figure, I don't think we needed to jump all over it as the dominant 1A element. Not arguing political standpoints here, either ... merely news vs. design gymnastics.

P.S. One Indiana paper went even another step too far; they ran the names of the state's dead in the shape of Indiana and mentioned the 2,000 total underneath.

For what it's worth, here's a rather interesting and detailed breakdown of 20th century war casualties.

http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat1.htm

(Sorry if this post duplicates what I said in a prior post that didn't appear.) Hear, hear on the "artificial milestone" comments. NYT and Chicago did it right by leading w/approval of the Iraqi constitution and using the 2,000 deaths as a secondary angle. One Indiana paper actually presented the names of the state's dead in the shape of Indiana! From a strictly news-judgment standpoint, I'm really disappointed how many papers jumped at the chance to exploit design gymnastics in this case.

Merely dwelling on the number of dead strips the meaning of their sacrifice of its context. By historical standards, the number is very low. And more importantly, 2,000 was reached was the same day that the Iraqi constitution was signed. To play up the dead and ignore the very, very good news that occured on the same day is an example of wallowing in defeatism.

I'd say the next milestone is when the number of troops killed in Iraq becomes equal to the number of people killed on 9/11. That's what this war is all about, isn't it? Oh. It's not? Well, we don't have enough space to run all those good news stories coming out of Iraq anyway.

At our paper, we used the 2,000 deaths as a lead story, but gave it no particularly special treatment. We're holding back for Veteran's Day, which is fast approaching. And I think that makes more sense than giving special treatment to a specific number.

As for the papers that did blow out the coverage, I think the Seattle PI and Newsday did the best job. I was a bit troubled by Oakland's lead headline, "War's critics praise soldiers for sacrifices." I mean, the war's supporters praise the soldiers, too. Was this written to deflect any criticism of their front-page treatment by the hawks? Maybe it's nothing, but it just kind of struck me as strange.

2,000 soldiers dead in however many months it's been is tragic, but it's not exactly a high-water mark. Look at how many were killed in Korea in that same time frame (and those of you who are blaming Bush, why the double standard -- bash Truman and the U.N. while you're at it). You wonder why the media gets so much flak from certain corners of society when they play up what only seems on its face to be a big deal. 2,000 soldiers dead in what may well be a noble cause is worth the sacrifice to protect and defend America, in the long run.

All that said, the P-I and Newsday did a tremendous job with their presentation. I don't get the distasteful art-hed treatments (which trivialized the sacrifices of the individual soldiers). Someone apparently missed Martin's presentation at SND.... Wonder what Hutch would say.

To: BBoy,
Assclowns, now that's mature.

I tend to believe that the average reader is a little smarter than people in the business give them credit for. Do they really need the newspaper to tell them what to believe?

Forget the dead? I've got family, friends and associates balls deep in Iraq. Forget the dead or those about to die? Hardly.

In my opinion, the worst thing that can be done to smash the impact of a subject or issue is to play it too much. Anyone remember all those pictures of the Ethiopian kids starving in the 1980s? The first time your heart bleeds....the 100th time, you flip the channel to ESPN.

See this New York Times article on Monday?

ttp://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/31/business/31deaths.html

There is plenty to criticize in an endeavor (waging war) that was a decision between something horrible or something worse.

I think it's worth perusing some of the stories written by Michael Yon to offset the "if it bleeds it leads" fixation of the networks.

http://www.michaelyon.blogspot.com/

The opposition to the war must have had to be able to predict a state of affairs even worse than the one the war was to remedy. Some did claim to have the soothsayer-like ability to predict a Stalingrad in Baghdad or a quagmire from day two, much like those, now discredited, who predicted a refugee crisis and intentional starvation of hundreds of thousands in Afghanistan which never came to pass.

The sole convincing moral case against the war would have had to demonstrate, either for certain or within a high likelihood that that the consequences of a regime change war were worse than the standing regime.
There were legitimate grounds for doubt and worry that the regime change project in Iraq would come to fail. The view that the war was risky kept some from endorsing it, but everything depends on the manner in which this view was and is articulated.

The general war opponent, in my experience have been those, certain of their view, speaking as if there were no case on the other side, often spoke to everything else they could think of in order to not have to speak to the weight of the moral calculus to be applied.

In my judgement, history will grade this a just action.