A national newspaper in Norway ran this photograph of a flag-draped coffin of a Norwegian soldier who was killed in Afghanistan. This is how the newspaper covered it on the Norwegian pages.
This has not yet been mentioned in U.S. newspapers.
Local Marine, 25, shot and killed … in his hometown.
I am not saying this story does not belong on the front page. As I said before, though, I wonder what is behind the decisions about story placement. Did someone from the newspaper attend the funeral, which was held this morning? Will they run that on the front page tomorrow? With a flag-draped coffin? Would that be OK because he did not die in Iraq?
In other news, a Florida soldier who died in Afghanistan was mentioned in an Associated Press brief on page 11.
I suck at math, so I need some help. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to do some figurin’. Here goes.
It takes 200 to 300 troops, two to three days out, to prepare a site for one congressional visit.
Depending on who you ask, that’s a conservative estimate.
More than 400 elected officials have visited Iraq* — most more than once, many several times, one has been there 15 times (so far, anyway) — since the mission was “accomplished” in May 2003.
*The link contains a database put together by Kirsten Korosec and Steven Stanek, who called every office in the House of Representatives. The database is useful even though it’s already out of date — because the visits keep on keepin’ on.
Do you know where your representative is?
My guess? Iraq. Go check the quarterly foreign travel reports at the Office of the Clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives.
Go ahead. I’ll wait.
Then go see how many U.S. troops died during each visit. If you want to see more than just names and dates, go here.
Do the math. Come back later, and we’ll compare notes.
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Metro section, page 4
Local soldier, 20, dies in Iraq.
Metro front page
Page 1
Nothing but teasers
My newspaper published an article about a local soldier’s funeral (sans flag-draped coffin) on the front page … of the metro section.
What was on the front front page?
1) An article about the cost of copper.
2) The presidential race.
3) A Washington Post article about security.
4) A Los Angeles Times article about Lady Bird Johnson.
5) Teasers to the life and sports sections.
Thirty U.S. troops have died so far this month, yet this is the only article written in-house. The newspaper ran an Associated Press article about a sailor from the other side of the state, and numbers of deaths may or may not be mentioned in wire stories picked up about “incidents” in Iraq.
I don’t mean to diminish the South Carolina tragedy in any way, but why did this photograph bother me? It ran across the front page of my hometown newspaper — and probably countless others — on June 23, 2007. Was it an attempt to ease a collective guilty conscience for refusing to run photographs of flag-draped coffins every day that U.S. troops return home that way?
For the record, 12 troops died June 23, 2007, and 111 troops died during June. Fifteen were from California. Florida lost two soldiers on June 21, which would have been more “local” than a fire in South Carolina, but my newspaper didn’t write about either of them.
Remember this controversy? Maytag Aircraft, a military contractor and subsidy of Mercury Air Group, Inc., fired cargo worker Tami Silicio for “violating U.S. government and company regulations” for submitting a photograph of flag-draped coffins of U.S. troops to The Seattle Times, which published it April 27, 2004. Her husband, David Landry, who also worked for the contractor, was fired too. (More coverage is here.)
The Pentagon had banned the media from taking photographs of caskets being returned to the United States since 1991, and this incident did nothing to ease that ban. Even so, Silicio was not “the media,” and the only Maytag Aircraft regulations that seem to cover this issue fall under the vague blanket of “and other company regulations.”
Russ Kick of The Memory Hole filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act and posted photographs not published in newspapers.
Some politicians and editors say that publishing photographs of military coffins would be seen as an antiwar statement by the media. If I were to follow that logic, would not publishing them be considered a prowar statement?
