UPDATED - ColdType

EMBEDDED: WEAPONS OF MASS DECEPTION
civilian dead, but that has to understate the overall
carnage which is psychologically traumatizing
a population as well as the men fighting. The
psychological drama here is just being noted. A
New York Times report on viewers who can’t
sleep because of their addiction to the coverage
resonates with my own experience:
“Mr. Angelo, the sleep-deprived telephone
worker, said he had given up reading about the
war in his favorite newspapers, including The
Philadelphia Inquirer, because he has often
found that much of the news compiled the previous
day has gone stale by the following morning.
“In place of the printed page, he says, he has
become addicted to the news crawls that stream
across the bottom of his 27-inch Sony when he is
watching CNN or Fox News.
“In contrast, J. C. Alonsoperez, 55, a molder at
a glass factory off Main, says he has sworn off the
very news channels on which Mr. Angelo relies.
He says he craves the more ‘in-depth’ analysis of
the war that he finds in The Inquirer, as well as
on National Public Radio and the BBC.
“After being captivated at first by the war, Mark
Roszkowski, 49, a financial planner from nearby
Wildwood Crest, said he now permitted himself to
watch only a few minutes of television coverage –
‘til I get the gist of what happened today’ –
because, he explained, ‘I don’t really like to dwell
on it.’ “His reasons are at least partly political. ‘It’s
upsetting to watch,’ he said, ‘because the more the
war goes on, the bleaker our future becomes.
We’re getting into something as a country that’s
going to be hard to get out of.’ ”
Remembering ‘The Bloomster’
REPORTS of the death of two more western jour-
176
nalists are coming in. Fox says one is German,
the other French. Others report they are Russian
. . . NBC is still mourning the loss of its media
star David Bloom, a.k.a “The Bloomster.” Everyone
watching the US coverage was impressed by
his inventiveness and conversational reporting
style. His Today Show training served him well,
but his own enterprise may have sealed his fate.
According to his colleague Tim Russert, he had
built that open-air platform he rode, like a modern
day Lawrence of Arabia across the desert.
He has even made sure that the people who engineered
it for him would not make another one
for a competitor.
Colleagues like John Simpson admired his
pluck and style: “During this war he had frequently
pushed the line dividing news from show
business, ducking rocket fire and broadcasting
live from a specially adapted M-88 tank retriever
known to colleagues as the ‘Bloom mobile,’ while
troops fought northwards. Bloom and his cameraman
were able to produce ‘jiggle-free’ video
even while racing through the desert, by using a
gyrostabilized camera.”
The Steadicam effect made him look great but
it also immobilized his legs, perhaps contributing
to the pulmonary embolism that was to claim
his life at age 39. He left a wife and three kids.
Michael Kelly, the conservative commentator
who perished in a Humvee accident left two kids.
All of their colleagues spoke about these children
as they should. As a father myself, I can
understand, and feel for both of their families.
Yet it made me sad to think of all the Iraqi children
being victimized in this war – half of Iraq’s
population is under l8 – who are all but forgotten
by a media focus on the US military.