Commentary and links relating to media coverage of war; both before, during, and after.
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William A. Dorman is Professor of Government at California State University, Sacramento, and has taught a course in War, Peace and the Mass Media since 1970.
Web Page
U.S. Foreign Policy Blog
E-Mail: dormanw at csus.edu
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War, Peace, and the Mass Media
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Thursday, March 08, 2007
Who Cares
NPR
"On the Media"
March 02, 2007
Heads are rolling in the wake of The Washington Post’s expose of deplorable conditions at Walter Reed. But Salon's Mark Benjamin has been writing variations on the Post’s story for years. He discusses the media’s newfound interest in wounded vets.
On Friday, the Secretary of the U.S. Army resigned. It was the latest shoe to drop in the wake of The Washington Post's expose two weeks ago about the breakdown in outpatient care at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. The article depicted an overloaded system, where soldiers with serious injuries must fend for themselves in a nightmarish bureaucracy with substandard facilities.
The Post may have made the biggest splash, but in recent weeks the plight of the wounded also sparked major pieces in Newsweek, The New York Times, The Boston Globe and NPR, among others. This week, ABC's Bob Woodruff hosted a special on vets with traumatic brain injuries, the signature injury of the roadside bomb, the injury he sustained last year.
It's clear why ABC latched onto that story, but why the sudden interest across the media? We put the question to a reporter who's been covering the stories of wounded Iraq war vets probably longer than anybody else. That's Mark Benjamin, of the online magazine Salon. He suggests that editors may be more willing to go after these stories partly because the public is more receptive to bleak news about the war.
To read the full text, see NPR.com
8:23 AM
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