THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

From the NY Times

Conservative chatterers have parroted President Bush's complaint that ''people resuming their normal lives will never be as dramatic as the footage of an I.E.D. explosion.''

But now two network personalities -- Ms. Dozier and Bob Woodruff -- have been severely injured by roadside bombs while embedded with the military, trying to do the sort of stories the administration wants.

''One thing I don't want to hear anymore,'' Steve Capus, the president of NBC News, told The Times's Bill Carter, ''is people like Laura Ingraham spewing about us not leaving our balconies in the Green Zone to cover what's really happening in Iraq.''

Even with constricted coverage, the tally of journalists killed in Iraq is now 71, more than the number killed in Vietnam or World War II. (This war is now six months short of the United States involvement in World War II, but at least then we knew we were winning by this point.)

But, as she notes, these are the deaths that we know about.

An American soldier was killed in the blast that killed the CBS cameraman and soundman and injured Ms. Dozier. But more than a day after we knew everything about the CBS victims, no information had been released about him.

There is a tragic anonymity about this war. Kids die but we don't know who they are, other than their names, which turn up in small print. They do not touch everyone's lives because, without a draft, they are not drawn from every part of American society. The administration tries to play down any sense of individual loss; the president has not attended a single funeral, and the government banned pictures of their returning coffins. The Iraqi civilians who die don't even get their names in the small print.

Someone tell Laura Ingraham that there is an opening for a "good news" reporter in Iraq.