Remember when photographing servicepeoples’ caskets coming back from the Middle East was the most important story on the media’s list?

No?

That’s OK – with Barack Obama in office, either does the media:

Remember the controversy over the Pentagon policy of not allowing the press to take pictures of the flag-draped caskets of American war dead as they arrived in the United States? Critics accused President Bush of trying to hide the terrible human cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“These young men and women are heroes,” Vice President Biden said in 2004, when he was senator from Delaware. “The idea that they are essentially snuck back into the country under the cover of night so no one can see that their casket has arrived, I just think is wrong.”

Not to bag on the Administration; they at least followed through on one promise:

In April of this year, the Obama administration lifted the press ban, which had been in place since the Persian Gulf War in 1991. Media outlets rushed to cover the first arrival of a fallen U.S. serviceman, and many photographers came back for the second arrival, and then the third.

But with no interest in tying an Administration for which they were utterly in the bag to the escalating cost of a war they’d never supported…?

But after that, the impassioned advocates of showing the true human cost of war grew tired of the story. Fewer and fewer photographers showed up. “It’s really fallen off,” says 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. “The flurry of interest has subsided.”

That’s an understatement. 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…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.

Now, it’s not like the war in Afghanistan is going anywhere soon.  Indeed, it looks like the Obama Administration is going to be to the country what Ike (at best) or LBJ (not at best) were to Vietnam (allowing in advance that historical parallels, especially about wars, are famously dicey).

So where’d the concern go?

Probably also resting in Crawford, Texas.  That’s my hunch.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Wednesday, September 30th, 2009 at 12:01 pm and is filed under Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.