"The battlefield between our ears" II

Further to Babbling's excellent analysis, Christie Blatchford has provided the context from Canadian journalism 101 (even 501 I'd venture):

With this week's deaths of six more Canadians - Rob Costall was the 11th Canuck to die in Afghanistan, a number that seems almost innocent now, like something from the good old days - there were the usual stark reminders.

A line I heard on CBC Newsworld, a teaser for the story to come on the evening news, on the day of the bombing captured it all.

"Tonight," a sombre voice intoned. "Six more Canadians die in Afghanistan. What happened?" the voice asked. "And what does this latest blow mean for the mission?"

With every single one of the deaths of the 66 Canadian soldiers who have died in that country, the media, like baying hounds in pursuit, ask those very questions or variants of them.

The inference in the first is that something went wrong, or someone screwed up, or that someone is to blame or some equipment is faulty or at best that something could have been done to prevent it. Canadians are in a general way obsessed with personal safety - to wit, bicycle helmets for all, the growing demand for the return of photo radar in Ontario, widespread bans not just on those substances that might kill the allergic but irritate the sensitive - and now it extends to the expectation that war, too, ought to be more manageable and less dangerous.

What happened?

A frigging big bomb, buried in a road that like every other road in southern Afghanistan is never really perfectly secure, blew apart an RG-31 Nyala, the vehicle purpose-built to withstand such blasts but which like all the vehicles in use in Afghanistan doesn't always do it perfectly, and the result was catastrophe.

The suggestion in the second question is that it's time to re-evaluate the United Nations-approved, Afghan-initiated, NATO-run mission. Again. The press has re-evaluated the mission 66 times [emphasis added].

What does a death, or six deaths, mean for the mission? Well, casualties ought not to be the determining factor - this mission either has merit or it does not. But each death ought not to be used automatically as fodder for another round of angst-ridden examination, largely from folks who consider Question Period a rough proving ground.

But that's what the death of a Canadian soldier has come to mean in my business - calls are made to the usual suspects (the leaders of opposition parties in Ottawa, military critics, groups baldly opposed to the mission) so that they might grind once again their various axes, and opinion polls are commissioned to measure the public mood after days of announcers sombrely asking, "What happened?" and lingering shots of returning caskets.

The army has a practice it calls "lessons learned." It is the reappraisal, sometimes painful, of events, battles, successes and failures. The idea is that there is always something to learn, the goal to avoid repeating mistakes where possible. It too works imperfectly, but we could do with a bit of that inward self-criticism in my game.

Except for those reporters who actually go to Kandahar, the only time the press appears to understand soldiers is when they are badly treated, terribly wounded or denied a treatment or pension to which they are entitled. These things happen too often, in Canada and everywhere else, and they need attention.

But the Canadian soldier is not by nature a victim, the media's best efforts to turn him into one notwithstanding. Neither is he a tragic figure. He's a soldier, resilient, hard and capable. The six killed this week were all of that. And so was Rob Costall.

Ms Blatchford has both a heart and a mind. It's a pity that so many others do not in what it now simply a battle for the hearts and minds of Canadians.

Update: More in a similar vein from Anthony Westell (online Globe and Mail only):

Excuse me for asking rude questions, but aren't the news media, including this newspaper, making far too much of a few deaths in Afghanistan? Aren't they playing straight into the hands of the enemy with those big black headlines, sob-story writing and dramatic televised clips of coffins, with pipers lamenting — not once, but twice, as they leave Afghanistan and then arrive in Canada?

The Taliban know they cannot defeat us on the battlefield, but they are well on the way to defeating us on the home front as morale sags and demands rise to "bring the boys home." When we decided to go to war to root out the Taliban, which was hosting Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network, didn't we know that some of our soldiers would be killed?..

I'm not suggesting the news media should not report it when Canadians are killed, only that the stories not be treated as big, shocking news. And that reporters who lay on the blood, sweat and tears with big brush strokes consider the impact.