War dead: Media interest fading?

by Mark Silva

We know the media have a certain limit when it comes to attention spans, but a columnist today has spotlighted that in a fairly poignant way:

When President Barack Obama lifted a ban against media coverage of returning war dead imposed by the first President Bush during the Gulf War, dozens turned out for the arrival of the first casket at which photography was permitted. Now, it's down to one lone photographer from the AP who lives near the Delaware base where the dead return.

"It's really fallen off," Lt. Joe Winter, spokesman for the Air Force Mortuary Affairs Operations Center at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, where all war dead are received, tells Byron York of the Washington Examiner. "The flurry of interest has subsided."

"When the casket bearing Air Force Tech. Sgt. Phillip Myers, of Hopewell, Va., arrived at Dover the night of April 5 -- the first arrival in which press coverage was allowed -- there were representatives of 35 media outlets on hand to cover the story,'' York notes. "Two days later, when the body of Army Spc. Israel Candelaria Mejias, of San Lorenzo, Puerto Rico, arrived, 17 media outlets were there.... On subsequent days in April, there were nearly a dozen press organizations on hand to cover arrivals.''

"Fast forward to today. On Sept. 2, when the casket bearing the body of Marine Lance Cpl. David Hall, of Elyria, Ohio, arrived at Dover, there was just one news outlet -- the Associated Press -- there to record it. The situation was pretty much the same when caskets arrived on Sept. 5, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 16, 22, 23 and 26. There has been no television coverage at all in September.''

Coverage is permitted only when the family of the fallen consent to it, but 60 percent do, York reports. York suggests there is something about George W. Bush's war in Iraq and Obama's wars that accounts for a clamor for media access that the second Bush denied, following his father's policy, and a tapering off of media interest in recent arrivals.

But it is the documentation and recognition of each soldier's passing that really is at issue here, and after a flurry of coverage at Dover with the advent of a new policy the AP has settled into a role of record-keeper that it performs on many fronts.

"The Associated Press, which supplies photos to 1,500 U.S. newspapers and 4,000 Web sites, has had a photographer at every arrival for which permission was granted. "It's our belief that this is important, that surely somewhere there is a paper, an audience, a readership, a family and a community for whom this homecoming is indeed news," says Paul Colford, director of media relations for AP. "It's been agreed internally that this is a responsibility for the AP to be there each and every time it is welcome."

Good for the AP.