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August 23, 2004

Iraq: 5 Americans dead

Shouldn't this be on every newspaper's front page?

5 US Soldiers Killed in 24 Hours, 1 Wounded

Let’s see... if I click on the NYT article with the headline about a freed reporter, and I read all the way to the end of the article, and then I keep reading, there seems to be something tacked onto the very end there...

Five American Marines Killed

In Anbar Province, the heart of the Sunni insurgency, five American marines with the First Marine Expeditionary Force were killed in separate incidents, the United States military command in Baghdad said Sunday.

They even printed another coupla paragraphs, for a grand total of 135 words, including header, hidden at the end of a much longer article about Najaf.

WaPo has nothing at all about Iraq on it’s front web page.

I know that this isn’t exactly a scientific survey, and that headlines and articles may change later today, but this illustrates just how well W’s insistence on symbolically handing “sovereignty” to his Iraqi puppets earlier this summer has worked exactly as planned: American news coverage is down significantly, and with election and Olympics news further sapping attention, odds are that most citizens will remain blissfully unaware that American troops are still being killed at alarming rates.

How alarming? The fatality rate since the symbolic turnover has actually increased to over 2 killed per day.

Posted by Norwood at August 23, 2004 07:06 AM
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