Dave Weinberger has an interesting post on the status of a story on the front page of the Boston Globe, featuring a disabled vet back from Iraq and declaring the place a quagmire. Dave takes issue with the Globe front-paging the story;
Why this soldier? Why front page? Because Sgt. Fountaine is now against the war? And if he had come through his experience thinking that his sacrifice was worth it, would that have consigned the story to an inner page? What do we learn from Sgt. Fountaine's change of heart? Does it point to a trend? If not, if it's so purely particular and individual, then why is it the headline?
We need individual stories. We need overviews. But in choosing to put this particular story on the front page with a headline and lead focusing on Sgt. Fountaine's change of heart, the Globe uses his story inappropriately. IMO.
The story is more likely to be about the shift in American attitudes
to the war, but the Globe cannot deal with that directly until those
attitudes have shifted enough to make it safe to talk about. So the
paper talks about the issue in code..
The human damage to US
Troops has not been acknowledged to any great degree, and the whole
subject of dead troops is taboo. By running this story the Globe is
acknowledging the shift in the zeitgeist. It is now acceptable to count
the human cost as the US psyche gets ready to accept defeat and
withdrawal.
In Vietnam it was the photos of the cost that drove
the change, in this war it is the realisation that the sunny
predictions are never going to come true, but the change has to be
associated in the public mind with something concrete. Photos of brave
soldiers are always acceptable in wartime.
The majority now
believe that "the war wasn't worth it", rather than the war was wrong.
These stories give that perspective something concrete to attach to.
It
also allows the assessment that Iraq is a quagmire to be held up in a
way that makes it harder for the happy talkers to deny. People like Kos
and Gilliard have been saying for almost exactly 3 years that it is a
quagmire. They have been roundly condemned by the war party for that.
But
if a disabled vet says it on the front page of the Globe, how can they
respond? "He doesn't have a leg to stand on?" The public is not yet
ready for editors to analyse the war honestly, and editors are
certainly not interested in taking the lead, so they sneak in on the
coattails of the particular and, by their placement and treatment,
signal the change using code that we all understand.
The fact that it has been upgraded from page B9 to A1 is a measure of the shift.
As
for whether it is acceptable; if it is acceptable to show US troops in
the streets of Fallujah, killing Iraqis, or film of bombs detonating in
the suburbs of Baghdad, or bombsite cameras showing the destruction of
a building and the people in it, or the nightscope view of men being
cut in half by machine gun fire, then a disabled vet is nothing more
than the other end of the continuum.
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