Media Musings: War claims lives of journalists too
We’ve all been dragged into this war. American troops on an aircraft carrier watch CNN to watch the war playing out, so we have soldiers watching soldiers.
The world audience watches the soldiers, as well. TV cameras are as much weaponry as are Bradley tanks. And the phrase theater of war takes on a new meaning.
We get to know the embedded correspondents, the brilliant and the banal, all 600 of them, more or less. They fill our houses with stunning visuals and the roar of death and destruction. We know they’re in harms way, but we suspend that reality to hear and see and read the latest reports.
CBS’s Dan Rather warned – wisely – that it’s not the “real war” because we don’t smell death and see death and be deafened by endless shelling and bombing. Thus, what we witness is abstraction, a perception, and an image of war.
Even so, when we see the loss of two of our finest correspondents in less than a week, it’s hard to either hold such pain as an abstraction or image.
First came the loss of Michael Kelly, the Atlantic Monthly editor who’d revived it in only two years. He was covering the war for the elite magazine when his life ended at 46. He hung out with his dad in the newsroom of The Washington Daily News when such newspapers were filled with great writers, drinkers, and countless hangers-on. All he ever wanted to be, wrote Maureen Dowd for The New York Times, was a reporter like his dad.
Better known, and beloved because he lived the life of a good guy pal, was David Bloom, who died at 39, NBC said, of a pulmonary embolism. Medical experts said confinement in planes and tanks for an extended period of time without any exercise, like walking, can cause these embolisms.
Like Kelly, Bloom left comfort to cover war, leaving his latest post as co-host of the weekend “Today Show” to be part of the big story. That’s what he always wanted to do – cover the big ones. And when he got to be a Washington correspondent for the network, he felt he had, indeed, arrived. His rise was quick, and his talents great.
The loss of such talent and the wives and children now left behind is obvious. But what is not obvious is why reporters do shove to get to the big story. This passion is hardly rewarded with big salaries, in most cases. But the drive for such assignments means you’ll be seeing history in a way few of us are privileged to see it made. And, when the time runs out and age finally conquers, they can look back with great memories of the good and the bad.
It’s noteworthy award-winning photojournalist Molly Bingham, who was captured by Iraqi forces, is already getting ready to leave, either back to Iraq, her first choice, or some other hot spot in the world. There is, she told Kati Couric, too much to see and to report in this sad world.
By the time this column runs, there will be more than the total six journalists dead and two more missing. Reuters reported that besides Bloom and Kelly, BBC cameraman Kaveh Golestan was killed by a land mine; Australian cameraman Paul Moran was killed by a car bomb; Terry Loyd, a ITN reporter was killed after coming under fire and Britain’s Channel 4 TV reporter Gaby Rado was found dead of unknown causes in an Iraqi hotel.
The hope remains that these reporters have not died in vain, and that – with the passage of some time – their colleagues can piece together an honest, comprehensive history of their times. When the administration’s and Pentagon’s shields finally fall, we will know then the truth of all of this. But it will take time. It always does.
(Ed Kimbrell is a professor in MTSU’s School of Journalism.)