Iraq War graphic MIA
Every Wednesday for many months we’ve run a graphic inside the A section tracking military deaths in the Iraq war. Today, there’s no graphic to be found.
A regular reader and critic of the paper wondered if the omission carried an editorial message. “Aren’t there enough deaths for your staff to gloat any more?”
In truth, the graphic didn’t appear through human error on our part. The graphic artist who usually updates the chart is on vacation this week. That person’s backup forgot to do it. The night news editor also is off this week, and his backup overlooked the missing chart. The person designing the news pages inside the A section and our copy editors who check page proofs also failed to note the omission.
We’ll have a note on A2 and run the graphic in Thursday’s Post-Dispatch.
Steve Parker is the deputy managing editor for news, and oversees the Post-Dispatch's front page. STLtoday's online news editors are on his newsroom team. Parker has been at the paper since September 1980. 
Honestly now, do you really think the ghoulish “death-o-meter” provides any value to your readers?
Out of sight, out of mind, eh?
Apparently so. With combat operations in Iraq winding down and related casualties in the single digits, that chart lost what little impact it may have had. If I were an editor at the Post, I’d have removed it too.
I’ve never understood the conflict over casualty counts. I do think that there is an element of the left that wants to use it strictly as some sort of emotional tool in anti-war propoganda. But I also don’t think its effective in that prupose, nor should it be. It’s just a fact that papers should report.
Here’s a fact that to my knowledge has been completely ignored by the press. While there have been numerous stories of a recent battle in Afghanistan in which the US Army suffered 9 killed and 15 wounded (including a soldier from this area, Army Cpl. Gunnar Zwilling, who was laid to rest at Jefferson Barracks today),try to find a single one that actually reports on the battle itself. Here’s a tidbit: we killed a heck of a lot more of them and gained some vital intelligence that is going to lead to even more bad guys exiting the terrestrial realm.
If the only source of news you had was the Post Dispatch, you might get the feeling all American troops do in Iraq and Afghanistan is stand around on street corners with their thumbs up their butts waiting to be blown up by a car bomb. The Post rarely, if ever, reports what a military unit was doing at the time members were killed or wounded. Support for the US missions over there would turn almost unanimously in favor if they did. The Post, as acutely dishonest in its position as it is, I believe knows this. They’ll never acknowledge that the narrative they’ve pushed over the past several years has been wrong. They’ll simply try to flush it down the memory hole and hope no one notices.
We still have troops in Germany. Why is thee not a running graphic on troops deaths there. ( It would currently be at about 60,000).
We still have troops in Japan from a war that started in 1942. why not a running graphic on troops killed there. ( It would currently be at about 250,000.)
let’s put a stop to the standard fox news and rush limberder induced argument right now…
listen closely, all you ditto heads…
we’re not spending 10-15 BILLION a MONTH and having our soldiers blown up in germany and japan!