Journalists

This is a nice side note to a sad story.

Kimberly Dozier, the CBS reporter wounded by a car bomb in Iraq, now has a Purple Heart at her bedside in a U.S. military hospital in Germany after a young American soldier gave her his medal, the network said.

Dozier, 39, was seriously injured in a blast Monday while covering a story on Memorial Day in Iraq. Her camera crew, Britons Paul Douglas and James Brolan, were killed in the attack, along with a U.S. soldier and an Iraqi translator [...]

On Thursday, CBS said an American soldier who had been awarded the Purple Heart medal for combat injuries made a special visit to the hospital to see Dozier.

"A young American soldier came up to Kimberly's brother Michael and told him that he had met Kimberly in Iraq two years ago after he had been wounded with shrapnel in his arm," CBS said without identifying the soldier. "The soldier had his Purple Heart with him, and he told Michael that he'd like Kimberly to have it because, he said, she's suffered as much as any soldier. That Purple Heart is now beside Kimberly's bed."

Here's a cheery stat: more journalists have now died in Iraq than did during all of World War II. If you count journalism support staff it's nearly 100 men and women dead covering this war. To be sure there is more media now than there was 60 years ago, but the theater of combat in WWII was so much bigger.

"It is absolutely striking," said Ann Cooper, the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. While cautioning that the recorded number of journalists killed in past conflicts may be inexact, she said: "We talk to veteran war correspondents who have covered everything going back to Vietnam and through Bosnia. Even those who have seen a number of different wars say they have never seen something like this conflict."

Meanwhile you have bloggers and media hotshots on the right chiding journalists for not reporting the good news from Iraq. Just recently right wing radio host Laura Ingraham charmed the Today show with this comment:

LAURA INGRAHAM, RADIO TALK SHOW HOST: To do a show from Iraq means to talk to the Iraqi military, to go out with the Iraqi military, to actually have a conversation with the people instead of reporting from hotel balconies about the latest IEDs going off.

95 journalists lost their lives while sitting on those "hotel balconies," and none of them deserve to be called cowards by the likes of a far-right bomb-thrower. It's frankly disgusting that you can express that much contempt for people who literally risk death to get their job done, and then never get called on it by anyone except us on the blogs.

I've had plenty of differences with the media in general and certain members of the media in particular, but I have a deep respect for those out in the war zones that try to get information while in almost constant danger. They are to be respected. And those that yell at them because their reporting doesn't fulfill some expected agenda, or chide them for being cowardly, are nothing but the lowest form of life.