Week 3 Opinion I Told You So........

In reference to my posting "In My Opinion" yesterday, it seems I was ahead of the curve with my opinion of the coverage the media has done on the injury to Mr. Woodruff. I am not the only person who felt that the media coverage was way overblown, and an insult to our service people serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. This morning I found this article on UPI that discussed that a number of troops have already expressed dismay at the media feeding frenzy about this event. The writer of the article, Pamela Hess, in her own words, re-illustrated my contention that the media is out of touch not only with their coverage of Mr. Woodruff's injury and its aftermath, but with the fact that before his injury it wasn't even news that we had first rate trauma facilities in Iraq.

She writes:
"ABC News' national broadcast Monday ran coverage on the extremely well equipped field and manned hospital at Balad Air Base, a transportable emergency room with not one but two neurosurgeons on duty, better than most emergency rooms in the United States.
It was a story ABC News became aware of because that was where Woodruff and Vogt were treated. It was not a story ABC necessarily had reason to do before; there was no news hook. However, this was where hundreds of wounded soldiers and Marines had previously been stabilized before being moved to Landstuhl Air Base.
"As we are hearing the details of Bob Woodruff's medical care and how he was shipped to Germany, and we go inside the operating room, (we realize) it's a part of the war that the press has basically ignored," said Montgomery.
In the midst of a two-month reporting trip in Iraq in 2005, I stopped at the Balad emergency hospital, toured it for an hour and interviewed a dozen doctors and nurses. I couldn't find a news hook to write about it, so I didn't. "
( I used the red font to show the pertinent part of the quotation)

Excuse me, but what planet is Ms. Hess living on? Over 2200 American service people have died in Iraq, and more than 8000 have been wounded badly enough to need evacuation, meaning that more than ten thousand Americans have needed to use these facilities, and neither the media as a whole, nor Ms. Hess, could manage to find a "hook" to make a report about it? But then, as soon as two of their own people are injured they immediately found a "hook"? The self-centered, hypocritical elitist " let them eat cake!" type of arrogance of this is breathtaking! It reinforces my original premise that the only people the media really care about is their own, they can barely give lip service to anyone not in the media. In my posting yesterday I said I thought the families of people who had had loved ones injured or killed in Iraq and Afghanistan would be livid at seeing the difference in the way their loved ones had been ignored by the media, but Mr.Woodruff's injury was scrutinized endlessly. They should be storming the halls of the "big media" over the media's coverage of this incident compared to the media's ignoring the story previously. This clearly illustrates how "out of touch" the media is with mainstream America, and it may be one of the reasons why so many people have a dislike, distrust, and disdain of the media.

Ms. Hess' entire article can be found at:
http://www.upi.com/SecurityTerrorism/view.php?StoryID=20060131-041958-8164r