THE NAMES, ALL THE NAMES

Glenn Reynolds notes that in response to Jeff Jarvis' discomfort with the Nightline stunt, a comment was posted that said, in effect, but it made me more committed. To me, that was a very striking comment, because I thought that the New York Times' editorial piece today, linking the Nightline event with various memorials in Washington, was enormously disingenuous. In their criticism of Sinclair, they try and link the show to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial:

That yearning to give military casualties the honor of an individual remembrance is ingrained in the modern national fabric. So it was shocking when the Sinclair Broadcast Group announced it would censor the ABC News program "Nightline" last night, when Ted Koppel read the names of the dead in the Iraq war. The company refused to broadcast the program in eight cities where it owns ABC affiliates, claiming that Mr. Koppel has an antiwar agenda. But local stations in six of those cities chose to run the program anyway when ABC made it available. (Sinclair's vice president, Mark Hyman, is a conservative commentator who produces "positive" stories about Iraq.)

The suggestion that it is biased to pause and particularize each of the latest war dead seems especially dishonorable when one visits the new memorial to the old war. There, the timeless implications of self-sacrifice include a quotation from Adm. Chester Nimitz: "Now they sleep side by side. To them we have a solemn obligation."

(Note the use of scare quotes around the word "positive.")

Now, I think what the Sinclair people did wasn't just wrong, it was silly. But to dismiss their argument in this way, to make it sound as if conservatives simply oppose any evidence of the cost of war, even if that means there is no public honoring of the war dead, is just as wrong -- and not silly.

The link to the Vietnam Memorial is exactly right. There is a large body of literature (some of the best of it written by a colleague of mine here, in fact) that points out that it is the focus on the names, all the names, that not only made the Memorial possible, and powerful, but also -- and people forget this -- made it a tremendous symbol of national healing. Because whether you had supported the war or opposed the war, the one thing you could agree on was the tragedy, the waste, the loss. But that was something that could only have happened after the war was over. Before wars end, war memorials don't work, not without becoming political. Because a focus on the names now, with no other information whatsoever, again sends the message, what a tragedy, if not the message, what a waste. Only in the context of a lost war could both sides agree that those lives had been wasted. Today, while many of us support this war, a single minded focus on loss, without a concommitant focus on purpose and mission, is by definition political. And while Jeff's reader may have seen in that loss a call to recommitment, so that their lives will not have been given up in vain, I suspect, as he notes, that is in part because he brings that bias to the viewing. Far more likely that an ambivalent viewer, confronted with tragedy after tragedy, loss after loss, with no reason, rhyme or purpose, will say, "why?" which is one step from saying "enough!"

Meanwhile, as to bias, I loved this piece from the Baltimore Sun. Talk about heavy handed. The Sinclair people contribute to Republican causes. (Really? I'd love to know who the ABC people contribute to.) Their news broadcasts resemble Fox News in form. (Uh oh.) And the guy taking point on this for them isn't only in the Reserves, he went to Iraq looking for unreported "positive" stories. (More scare quotes.) Nightline, on the other hand, is "critically acclaimed."

But I mention that piece to draw attention, again, to Nightline's executive producer, who is still peddling the same line:

"If you agree with the war or disagree with the war, these people here have died in our names. We think it's the least we can do, to list their names."

No, sir. That's the least we can do, as private citizens, in Memorial Day services. You, on the other hand, are the head of a large news organization and have a choice. The least you can do is to report their deaths fully, accurately, and in context. You have not been doing it.

And this stunt does not get you off the change those facts.

Comments

[wramm]

I don't think it changes your argument much, but I think the reference in the Times editorial is to the new World War II memorial, which opened this past week, not the Vietnam Memorial. (Hence the Nimitz quote.) In the WW II Memorial the dead are not listed, rather they are represented by 4,000 gold stars, each star representing 100 soldiers who gave their lives. Also, the Nimitz quote in the Times is one of the inscriptions in the memorial.

[dauber]

They start there (and you're right, that's the hook they use) but end with the Wall.

[Ron Hardin]

It's partly under statistical trickery in general. If you have a large population, you can make anything you want a deadly menace. Deadly menaces produce audience. So that's what they do.

Whether you want to do something or not depends on how dangerous it is. You judge danger by how many people _in your vicinity_ die from it. Everybody knows a family a few streets away that lost somebody in a traffic accident. That's more or less the standard for acceptable danger. We drive out for pizza without giving that a second thought, because in our neighborhood only a rare instance has come up of it being fatal.

That does not get more dangerous when you count deaths in more neighborhoods! The news business though brings every oddball event to you as if it's in your neighborhood, and it becomes apparently dangerous to that natural calculation you do. That's the hook for the audience. The audience watches, fascinated.

Not only news alone. Watch for tornado safety warnings when budget time for NOAA comes up. Hearne's Law : whenever there's a stink about something in the news, it's because some politician or charity wants a stink about it in the news.

So will there be a profile of SUV rollover victims? That would make SUVs seem impossibly dangerous. All you have to do is seek every rollover out of a population of 300 million, and present them seriatim.

That statistical trick is at work in this being anti-war, coloring itself as memorializing.

It would be undone if, as was said, context were supplied, benefit and cost both given, and then you could see what was going on, and reasons for it.

[Ron Hardin]

con't. I wonder what the normal death rate is among soldiers, not in combat zones. The reason to ask is that that is the equivalent standard for an acceptable death rate, one that you give no attention to. So the current rate is X times that rate; and that might give you a point to make a judgment on. It was to be scaled by population, whatever you do, and that might achieve it.

The point to honor is not soldiers being killed, but their being there in the first place.