RATHER ANNOYING, AND INAPPROPRIATE I MIGHT ADD

Did you happen to catch Dan Rather's 2:00 P.M. war update, on CBS this afternoon? The veteran newscaster, whose tone and style I've never come to appreciate, did something I never imagined seeing on a national broadcast related to casualties of war. At the end of a compressed update on the day's events in Iraq and the surrounding region, CBS, with Rather at the lead, had the gall to post a graphical 'kill count' detailing the number of US and British soldiers killed to-date. Nothing remarkable about that, right? Well, as my mother is fond of saying, "it's not what you say but how you say it" that counts.

In this case, I sat stunned as I watched the graphic, complete with national flags and a corresponding number of dead for each, all neatly wrapped around Dan Rather's stoic voice announcing the number of soldiers killed for each country engaged in the conflict, as if it he were giving an Olympic medal count update (seemingly taking joy from the fact that the US was ahead in the count by having fewer dead than the Brits). I guess nothing should surprise me anymore. SNL's Weekend Update could not have done a better job of mocking the situation (and in fact doesn't even need to, because CBS seems to be doing a good job of it all on its own).

Well, there's not much in the media today that makes me proud to have been a journalism major. Here in Switzerland, we're watching and hearing lots of the BBC, though all the other channels (the ones in languages we don't understand) are also covering the war, and I'm surprised by the number of embedded journalists. Are the American journalists referring to the British contributions to the war (other than the casualty count), or is it all about us? I don't recall hearing anything about British troops massing in Kuwait while the Americans were arriving.