Woodruff -- One Star, Big Constellation

Kimberly Dozier has a column up at CBSNews.com where she discusses the challenges faced by journalists in Iraq. Towards the end, she offers up some perspective:

…if we, the journalists, are sitting in hot water, the troops we cover are hopping around on Hell's coals. Even when we spend extended time with them, we face a tiny fraction of their risk.

It's even worse for their Iraqi army and police counterparts, who are getting attacked at even higher rates, with deadlier consequences.

And then you've got the Iraqi people, who never signed up for combat, but are sure seeing a lot of it. And they're not restricted to tours of duty, nor do they have a ticket out.

So yes, absolutely, journalists face awful, dangerous risks in Iraq, more so than almost anyplace else on earth right now.

But it's nothing compared to the people we cover.

That's true, for the most part. Depending on who you ask, between 79 and 101 journalists have been killed in Iraq. While it's extremely difficult to compare the percentage of journalists killed versus the percentage of military or civilians killed, it seems safer to be an American journalist in Iraq than it is to be a soldier, policeman or man on the street. There have been more than 2,200 U.S. military casualties in Iraq alone, and civilian casualties, though difficult to estimate, are thought to be in the tens of thousands.

So why do people like Bob Woodruff and Jill Carroll get so much coverage? For one thing, their stories hit close to home. As Howard Kurtz wrote today, "Every death or injury in Iraq is important, whether it's a journalist or soldier or civilian. But when you know someone, or have talked to someone, just before things take a turn for the worst, it hits home in a very personal way." Police officers are hit particularly hard when one of their own is injured, put at risk, or killed, and journalists are no different. They're more interested in the story and more diligent in their reporting.

Part of the flurry of coverage of journalists in peril also has to do with expectations. A journalist is not a soldier. War correspondents and the people who work with them know the risks they face, but they are not designated combatants. They put themselves at risk in order to perform an essential function – helping people understand the truth on the ground. When journalists are hurt or killed, it has a symbolic meaning as well as a literal consequence. Doug Vogt and Woodruff's injuries suggest that not even the truth, or our best approximation of it, remains safe.

That's not to say that what journalists are doing in Iraq is any more important than what soldiers are doing. It is not. But there's a reason the Joseph Stalin quote that "a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic" has endured. As the military deaths in Iraq have piled up, their visceral impact has been diminished. The deaths of Iraqi civilians are also tragic, but they don't hit home for most Americans.

There's another, relatively obvious factor at play here as well: Celebrity. Woodruff's injury has been greeted with far more fanfare than the death or injury of other journalists in Iraq. Even the kidnapping of Jill Carroll, a young woman with a compelling story, didn't generate this level of coverage. I think there's something important inside of this seemingly banal observation. To pick up on the issue raised in the previous post, it's jarring that someone like Woodruff, with his status and (presumably) relatively high level of protection, has suffered such a serious injury. As Alessandra Stanley suggested in The New York Times, Woodruff's fate paints a portrait of an Iraq that has reached a level of chaos that Americans, even foreign correspondents, like to think they're inured against.