hughbiquitous

Editors Ponder How to Present a Broad Picture of Iraq (New York Times)

The New York Times, of all outlets, has all but admitted that we’re not getting the whole story of Iraq.

You see, it turns out that reporters in Iraq have discovered that a war zone is a dangerous place, and it’s “much easier to add up the number of dead than to determine how many hospitals received power on a particular day or how many schools were built.”

Furthermore, “Iraq remains the most dangerous place in the world to work as a journalist, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. At least 13 media workers have been killed in Iraq so far this year, bringing the total to 50 since the war began in 2003.”

Contrast that with this report coming in from an aunt of a friend of mine, who is publishing a book on Jihadism next month:

…[In] my opinion, after taking a pretty good look at operations from the perspective of the guys who are actually running the war, is that the media has it wrong. They spend all their time looking at spectacular attacks by these really disgusting people, focus entirely on numbers of dead and wounded, and, if they talk about the political process, emphasize setbacks (like the fact that the constitution wasn’t issued on time). I think that this happens for a lot of reasons, but mostly because… they never leave the “green zone” in Baghdad (a little bubble of the West) and therefore have absolutely no perspective on what’s happening outside their immediate area…

All the news that’s safe to cover, eh?

I just got an e-mail from Blockbuster that said:

“Your BLOCKBUSTER Online Membership

CNN is reporting a mind-boggling story.

Apparently it has been discovered that hospitals in Paris have been keeping the corpses of “stillborn babies” on hand rather than burying or cremating them as the law requires. The hospital featured in the article had over 350 dead babies in its morgue, some for twenty years.

How did this discovery come to light? A mother of one of the dead babies went searching for her child. But wait - quoting now:

One woman’s search for the remains of a fetus she had aborted in 2002 led to the discovery, Le Parisien reported.

“I wanted to verify that my child was cremated, like they said he would be,” 27-year-old Caroline Lemoine was quoted as telling the paper. Following repeated requests for the date of cremation, the hospital acknowledged it had not disposed of the body.

“They told me ‘Your son has not been cremated, his body is still here,”‘ said Lemoine, who had the abortion after doctors said her pregnancy was not viable.

“At last I knew the truth,” she said. “My mourning came to an end.”

…say again?

1. In the first paragraph, it’s a fetus. In the second, it’s her child. Why the change in terminology?
2. The “doctors said her pregnancy was not viable.” That may be, but I wonder - are these the same doctors who said the baby would be cremated, but kept the baby in the freezer?
3. “At last I knew the truth.” Truth? Truth? To which truth does she refer: what happened to her child, or what happened to her child?
4. “My mourning came to an end.” Are we to understand that with this gruesome discovery, now she can sleep at night?