burying the dead

so on the front page of today's new york times there is an article entitled With Help Sea Turtles Rally to Escape Oblivion. meanwhile a small blurb to the left tells us to refer to page A10 to read about the 6 u.s. soldiers who died in iraq yesterday. six soldiers! that used to be a lot. not too long ago, it would have been the lead headline (although maybe not the day after a presidential debate, but it would have at least bumped the sea turtles off the front page).*

but it's even worse than that. if you turn to page A10 and scan the headlines, there is no sign of any u.s. casualties. the only mention of the six deaths on the page (indeed, in the entire paper) is if you read this single sentence in the third paragraph of the article with the headline Iraq Demands Falluja Give Up Its Militants From Abroad:

Also on Wednesday, six American soldiers were reported killed in insurgent attacks in the previous 24 hours, two in suicide blasts and four in roadside bombings.

that's it. that's all the information we get.

believe it or not, i am not writing this primarily to criticize the Times (maybe secondarily, i haven't decided yet), but more to illustrate how as the violence in iraq gets worse, we are actually getting less coverage of the carnage. maybe it's because journalists are leaving iraq, but even those who are in iraq have stated they live in a state of virtual house arrest because of the dangerous conditions in the country. maybe the reason there is so little information about these deaths is that no reporter has access to any more information than the u.s. military death announcement.

another factor may simply be story fatigue. stories about the death of soldiers in iraq has been done to death. the casualties that get attention nowadays are the more unusual ones. first, it was non-soldiers deaths and kidnappings, but then when that became too commonplace, the bar was raised even higher. now to get wide coverage, there basically has to be a beheading. but that realization only encourages beheadings. and even that may not be enough anymore. yesterday's beheadings apparently didn't make the cut. but the victims were all foreigners, so maybe that's a bad example (or rather an example of yet another bias in american news reporting).

story fatigue is a natural product of human nature. we don't like reading the same thing over and over again. and if we do, the story loses it's impact over time, even if the facts get worse. but we owe it to the people in iraq to not let their deaths fade into background noise.

*for the record, i have nothing against sea turtles and fervently wish that they escape from oblivion