The Message

Of course, only one segment of the electronic media did much more than acknowledge his existence, and its ardor has cooled. That's what he gets for not being more volcanic.

Full service: For supporters of a continuing U.S. armed presence in Iraq, it wasn't a very amusing April Fools' joke. In the April 1 Post, a New York Times article headlined "Army Service Now a Hard Sell" appeared opposite "Portraits of Valor," which collected obituaries of soldiers killed in the land of Saddam. Suddenly, the sell became that much harder.

Since editorialists at the Post have been more critical of the Iraq war than have their Rocky counterparts, the placement of a recruiting story alongside military obits suggests a not-so-subtle message. Post managing editor Gary Clark, corresponding via e-mail, disputes this interpretation and adds that the paper has received no complaints about the juxtaposition or the portraits in general, which are provided by the AP.

Some hawks have claimed that by concentrating on those who've lost their lives, no matter how respectfully, news organizations undermine the war effort. That was the argument made by execs at Sinclair Broadcasting Group, whose ABC stations were ordered not to air an April 30, 2004, episode of Nightline that consisted entirely of host Ted Koppel reading the names of the 700-plus men and women who'd died since the conflict began. The latest casualty numbers exceed 1,500.

Right-wing condemnation of this concept didn't dissuade the Post from making a similar commitment. The Post printed eight sets of portraits between May 2003, when President George W. Bush declared the end of major combat in Iraq, and the following November. Occasional military obits ran in the eight months after that, but they tended to concentrate on soldiers with local connections. That changed in July 2004, when Clark "told editors here that we wanted to run a portrait of every serviceman or servicewoman killed in Iraq or Afghanistan." The presidential campaign was heating up then, but according to Clark, the real motivation behind the decision was to serve readers, who "said they appreciated the profiles." The Post spent the second half of 2004 catching up on obits missed prior to the edict, and installments like the one that was published on April 22 show that the broadsheet is trying to "stay as current as possible." In Clark's view, "There may be no other reoccurring feature in the paper that gets the kind of praise and appreciation the portraits receive."

But probably not from recruiters.