Sunday, May 02, 2004

Jay Rosen has a thoughtful post (with some less thoughtful comments) about the mini-furor over Ted Koppel's decision to air on "Nightline" the names of soldiers killed in Iraq. To me, as I note on Rosen's site, the amazing thing is that there is controversy at all. Whatever one may think of Koppel's political agenda, if any, the broadcast made only one journalistic statement: These deaths are worthy of notice. That assertion isn't even disputed. Beyond that, this was "just-the-facts" reporting at its purest. It says something about how split this country is when even merely naming war dead becomes a political hot potato.

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