04/10/05 "Chicago Sun Times" - - During the last three weeks, television news -- cable and network -- have spent more time on the dying and deaths of two individuals than they have on all the civilian Iraqi casualties since the beginning of the war.
One of the deaths, of Pope John Paul II, certainly deserved coverage, though not the wall-to-wall reporting on his life -- highlights highlighted, criticisms downplayed. Doubtless a great man and, perhaps, soon-to-be saint, passing the founder of Opus Dei, Josemaria Escriva, who John Paul II fast-tracked as the quickest canonization, a mere 27 years after Escriva's death.
The other death coverage, Terri Schiavo's, focused on a woman with fewer accomplishments -- the chief one being losing a lot of weight in a fairly short period of time, a leading cause of the calamity that befell her.
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intercession of Congress provided the final media propellant for Schiavo's notoriety. Her cause fit the conservative right wing's continuing attack on the ''activist judiciary,'' regardless of the fact that the most prominent of the judges involved was both Republican and religious, showing that the far-right is willing to sacrifice anyone in pursuit of its goal: the end of co-equal, three-branch government.
Schiavo's parents, either wittingly or unwittingly, turned their daughter into a cash cow for the last seven years, a collection plate for a variety of pro-life organizations and initiatives.
Pope John Paul II served as pontiff for more than a quarter of a century. He fulfilled, so the story goes, the last of the Lady of Fatima's predictions, by being shot by a would-be assassin. John Paul II's mix of fundamental Polish Catholicism and pure anti-communism, encased in a kindly and worldly demeanor, won him the regard of a large portion of the
world.
President Bush is breaking tradition by attending the pope's funeral, the first sitting president to do so, but the times have changed: George W. Bush sets his own traditions, while cementing his ties with the faith-based communities of the planet.
Before heading off to the Vatican, the president awarded the first Medal of Honor of the Iraq war, posthumously, to Sgt. 1st Class Paul Smith, for valor above and beyond the call of duty. The award was made on the anniversary of Smith's death. Given the description of the incident that led to the honor, the medal could be dispensed more frequently than once, given the nature of the Iraq conflict.
The firefight came about when his men were creating a temporary jail for captured Iraqis when they were set upon by 100 members of Saddam's Republican Guard. Smith held them off with a .50 caliber machine gun till he was killed. Building a temporary prison was certainly putting the cart before the horse,!
given
the circumstances, but it was fitting that a brave single soldier got some attention in the midst of the avalanche of coverage afforded Schiavo and the pope. But ordinary Iraqis have been, and are, paying a high price for their liberation. And the Bush administration is more than willing for them to pay that price.
The hope of 24/7 television news is that there is so much time to fill that every once in a while something of substance will be uttered or revealed. Alas, experience has shown that not to be the case. A viewer of the Schiavo and pope's coverage must leave the surface and go to print. The television age has paradoxically left people more informed and more ignorant at the same time.
During this period of selective mourning, the White House oversaw the release of yet another not-so-independent commission's report, one reviewing the intelligence failures of all the pre-9/11 spook organizations. It went out of its way to claim -- a point the White!
House
emphasized -- that no political pressure was exercised to gain the faulty intelligence the Bush administration was so eager to spread about and act upon. Most of that scandal was buried under the two death watches on TV, and administration spin was hardly necessary. It isn't an intelligence failure that the number of Iraqi civilian deaths still remains either contested or unknown -- pick your own figure: 10,000 or more than 100,000 -- but a more troubling failure: that so few Americans even want to know
