This is Not a Love Song


I recently caught the tail end of a brief news story on a local cable news station. One of the 14 soldiers killed in the helicopter that crashed a few days ago in Iraq was a local kid and was receiving the obligatory brief mention.


The story went on in an even briefer mention of some of the other kids on board. Something mentioned caught my eye...so I went web searching some news sites and the official site of the 25th Inf Div to get more information.


Here's the gist of it:
21 year old Specialist Nathan Hubbard was killed in the crash...and he's the second son to be killed in action in Iraq. His brother Jared died there in 2004. Nathan and his other sibling, Jason, enlisted together after Jared's death and served in the same division and deployed together in Iraq. Jason was on the same mission the night of the crash and watched his brother Nathan's chopper go down and crash and burn. Nathan and Jason had joined to continue what their brother started and to look out for each other.



This is the type of story about family, sacrifice, loyalty, duty, sadness, tragedy that perfectly brings home to the American public the realities of the war in Iraq. It puts the effects of the war right in the reader's face. But....



...this story was almost completely passed over by the media. Yet again the fourth estate has fallen down on the job.

Instead...much of the coverage that eclipsed this story was all about another American family.

"Jenna Bush Engaged" is what they breathlessly reported for the entire week. The TV networks rolled out footage of presidential daughters going back to LBJ's Basset Hound-esque offspring. Now Jenna Bush is betrothed to the son of some Republican Party bigwig (if she truly were a rebellious daughter and not just a drunken party girl she'd have chosen some hairy neo-hippie). Looking at the two squeaky clean, slack-eyed kids together...one can't help but get the creepy feeling of an arranged marriage. I half expected to see Angela Lansbury flitting about making the arrangements The Manchurian Candidate style.

Cue much breathy commentary from media types about how Party Girl Number One has cleaned up her image, is growing up. You know the types of stories....

In looking at the coverage of the two stories...I can't help but shake my head at the prioritizing of the media in what they consider news. On the one hand...a story containing all the human drama and tragedy imaginable goes mostly unreported. On the other...a fluff piece about Generalissimo Busho's fermented piece of crotch fruit putting her tequila bottle down long enough to find a man gets coverage on every network...for days.

This isn't really the surprise to me it sounds like. I'm much too cynical. But sometimes the media still manages to shock me.