Bob Woodruff

I'm grateful that Bob Woodruff and his cameraman will head back to the US tonight, and appear to be on the road to recovery. With all the hoopla over the other big news stories in the blogosphere, particularly Justice Alito, you wouldn't know how big a story this was. But for a major network news anchor to nearly die while carrying out his job in Iraq is kind of stunning. Of course, Byron York can't imagine what the fuss is about:

Yesterday, all the television networks -- not just ABC -- devoted an extraordinary amount of time to the incident. While the story was certainly news, did it warrant two pieces at the top of "World News Tonight" and another at the end?

Yeah, imagine that World News Tonight would even mention that their anchor had to have surgery where his head was partially taken off! Must have been a slow news day!

The media as it's constructed today reacts more forcefully when something happens close to where they live. That's why the anthrax story was so big in late 2001: Brokaw and Jennings got tainted letters. Unlike that story, Woodruff's experience mirrors what is going on in Iraq every day, and if that's the entry for the traditional media into telling that story, so be it. It seems that the US military would rather there be no coverage of any wounding or any death: witness the ban on photographing flag-draped coffins, or the virtual blackout on images of the dead in newspapers. Woodruff puts the entire story of Iraq in stark relief; it's real, it's happening, and it continues.

I thought this was kind of interesting:

Doctors say the immediate treatment Woodruff and Vogt received in Iraq, and the fact that both were wearing body armor, were crucial in their survival. They were wearing body armor, helmets and ballistic glasses.

Body armor, that's the stuff that soldiers still have to buy on the Internet because the military is still not providing it for them. That's the stuff that the Army has ordered them not to wear and told them that if they do they wouldn't be eligible for $400,000 in family death benefits. That's the stuff that could have saved many lives besides Woodruff's in Iraq, according to a Pentagon study.

Yes, Byron, the coverage is out of proportion. The real story is why every soldier isn't protected as much as these journalists were.