News that Robert Woodruff and Douglas Vogt of ABC News have been seriously injured by a road-side bomb in Iraq saddens, but does not surprise. Did we expect celebrity immunity?
What surprises is the media's narcissistic reaction.
Woodruf, 44, is one of the co-anchors to ABC World News. He replaced Peter Jennings. Vogt is a veteran cameraman. Both were embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq, and both risked their necks to satisfy our craving for immediacy.
The practice of embedding journalist with troops makes no sense. Must we be voyeurs of war? Are our lives so devoid of immediacy and compelling drama that we must get up close and personal with each shattered limb, each life taken?
More than 1,000 U.S. military personnel have died in this senseless war; thousands more have been maimed for life. Each volunteered to serve and each accepted the risk that comes of being a combatant. Not one enjoyed the wealth of easy familiarity with a camera.
All the hand-wringing and chest thumping of the media about Woodruff's and Vogt's injury is repulsive. Why not mourn the kid who chose the military because he had no other option? Is the war real now only because it wounded in a way makeup cannot cover?
Woodruff and Vogt are undoubtedly men with virtues common to us all. But the media's narcissistic blather about their injuries looks more like the entitled cry of the privileged. Did the uber-anchors really think the world's suffering and folly was beneath them -- a feast on which they could grow wealthy while reporting with such empathy?
Enough on Woodruff and Vogt. Ordinary Americans are dying almost daily in a war based on a lie, and pursued with no realistic prospect of success. That is the real story.
