Four thousands American troops have died so far in Iraq, and yet most Americans wouldn't know we've reached an arbitrary threshold of THIS HAS GONE ON LONG ENOUGH.
How come? Blame the media, blame our attention span, blame Ashton Kutcher's new TV show and the premiere of The Hills.
While a Pew study concludes more than half of Americans followed Iraq developedments "very closely" in the months just before and after the war, that number has slid to just 30 percent since last fall.
WHY?! It's time to man-slashpundit-up to form some sort of understanding, whether true or false, because who really cares if there's an expert to quote and there's copy to fill?
Everyone's got a theory!
• Alex S. Jones, director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard: "Vietnam held the media’s attention a lot better because it was a war with a draft that touched a lot more people; people were sent against their will, and many more Americans were killed. [...] Danger and the expense are gigantic factors. The news media have to constantly revisit how much money and risk to expend.”
• Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Center: “The available news hole got so much smaller because election and economic news took up so much of the space."
• Michael E. O’Hanlon, a senior fellow on national security at the Brookings Institution: [He argued that Americans who support the war might not have wanted to follow the news when it was bad, and that Americans against the war are less interested now that the news is better. And the presidential candidates, he said, have shown] “surprisingly little interest in discussing it in detail.”
Editorial Director
It seems like us bloggers are the ones saying it the most - kudos to you.
How about the fact that your gov't won't allow journalists to cover the return of bodies to US soil and the funerals? In Canada, every time a soldier's body is returned from Afghanistan, we see it on the news. Members of the gov't are at the airport, and the body is driven in a hearse down one of our major highways which has been renamed "Highway of Heroes". People come to stand at the side of the road to salute as the hearse goes by. We get front page coverage of the funeral and information about the soldier. Canadians know their soldiers are dying.
how about the quoted 90000 iraqi civillians that have been killed? and the fact that children of iraq are growing up in militant orphanages with a deep hatred for all the soldiers ( maily american but you think they can tell the difference betweeen a british or american soldier?) don't forget that… was everything they've done and died for.. was it nothing?
Keiren63, that is so beautiful! It really honors those that lost their lives as well as their families. This whole war and our present government is sickening! Hopefully, we will have a Democrat in office next year and end this madness of George Bush!