- Peter Mansbridge is Chief Correspondent of Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation (CBC) Television News and Anchor of The National
-
- It must be a very long and very quiet 48 hours -- the
time it takes to fly a giant United States air force C5 aircraft from Baghdad
through a series of stops to its final destination in Dover, Del. When
the C5 taxis up to one of the hangars, a six-person guard of honour awaits,
patiently holding American flags, each carefully folded and soon to be
draped over the plane's cargo -- long aluminum cases.
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- Dover is home to the Charles C. Carson Center for Mortuary
Affairs -- the largest Department of Defense Mortuary. It's where America
brings its dead soldiers home, and these days, it's busy. Normally, seven
people work at the centre; since March, when the Iraq war began, there
have been as many as 200 on staff. On May 1, George W. Bush, after landing
on an aircraft carrier off the California coast, declared major combat
operations over -- but in the mortuary, aluminum cases keep arriving, lately
at a rate of one a day.
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- Staff members at the mortuary are polite and helpful
with phone inquiries: they answer almost any question. Just don't ask whether
cameras can be present for those C5 arrivals, because that's where they
draw the line. Such images can have such an effect on not only emotions,
but also support for a conflict that is dragging on much longer than many
had expected. And at a cost: in U.S. lives, now 250 -- and in dollars,
now forecast in the hundreds of billions.
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- One morning recently, before the attention given to the
suicide bomb attack on the United Nations mission in Baghdad, I was surfing
for more information about a new ambush of U.S. soldiers in Iraq. I switched
to a newscast on CNN but was stunned to see that the story, only a couple
of hours old at that point, was relegated to a spot behind pictures of
a day-old underwater kissing contest in Italy, and a report on a triple
play executed by a shortstop for the Atlanta Braves the previous night.
The networks may be denied access to some of those telling pictures of
the dead arriving back in the United States, but even if they had them,
you wonder whether they would give the story of Americans dying in Iraq
any more prominence.
-
- There seems to be a certain uneasiness about the Iraq
issue that may be due to something else that's become apparent in the past
few weeks. Viewers are shying away from news: it's happening across the
continent, across the networks, and it's not just the traditional summer
doldrums. News consumers are either finding their fix elsewhere, or simply
tuning out, finding the gruel unappetizing, or worse, uninformative. There
has been a certain redefinition of news in the two years since Sept. 11:
some things don't seem as important as they once did, after witnessing
the events and aftermath of that day. These are challenging times for the
media: stories are more complex, more international, and more expensive
to cover, but the onus remains on us to find new ways to tell the ones
that are important. They aren't Kobe Bryant, Laci Peterson or necking in
the fountains of the Piazza Navona -- in short, the sort of stories that
an industry worried about declining audience numbers may gravitate towards.
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- When the next C5 hits the runway at Dover, maybe some
enterprising reporter will find a respectful way to show us, and then follow
the flag-draped casket to its final resting place. Meet the family, the
friends and the community leaders of the town that lost a brave soul, and
find out how they feel now about the conflict that the media couldn't wait
to cover when it was all "shock and awe." Whatever we hear, it'll
probably have a lot more resonance than the "permitted" way to
cover this story -- sitting in the Pentagon or the White House briefing
room, getting the varnished truth.
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