Mother Jones
by Judith Coburn

07/18/05

'Cost of the war': a cliché to normalize the carnage, like the anaesthetizing term 'collateral damage' and that new semantic horror, 'torture lite.' And yet the 'cost of the war' report, by now a hackneyed convention of American journalism, includes only American casualties -- no Iraqis -- itself a violation of the American mainstream media's own professed commitment to 'objectivity.' Three years of 'anniversary' articles in the American media adding up the so-called 'cost of the war' in Iraq have focused exclusively on Americans killed, American dollars spent, American hardware destroyed, with barely a mention of the Iraqi dead as part of that 'cost.' The dead are counted. But they are Americans. The names are named. But they are Americans. The names and numbers of the dead are intoned aloud or their photographs papered on media 'walls' and they are always only American. Publishing or pronouncing the names of the American dead everyday without ever mentioning the names of the Iraqi dead offers a powerful message that only American dying matters...

http://tinyurl.com/78mg7


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp