The Boston Globe today has a story by Brian MacQuarrie about a local boy who went to Iraq as a tank commander and came back with nothing below his knees. Well-done story. But what put it on the front page, presumably, is that Sgt. Walter Fountaine “now considers the war a military quagmire…” And a week ago, Pres. Bush chatted with Fountaine at the hospital, although the issue of the war did not arise.

Why is this a story at all? There are elements of a war that can only be understood by telling individual stories. The Globe, like all newspapers, tells those stories on occasion. Sometimes it tells them well, as in this case. No one is typical, of course, but without reading about individual soldiers and civilians, we can only see a war through a high-altitude bomb site. Without the summaries, we are blind, but the war cannot be understood only in summary. The legless boys, the burned children, the purple-inked voters are more than their aggregation into an overview.

Why this soldier? Why front page? Because Sgt. Fountaine is now against the war? And if he had come through his experience thinking that his sacrifice was worth it, would that have consigned the story to an inner page? What do we learn from Sgt. Fountaine’s change of heart? Does it point to a trend? If not, if it’s so purely particular and individual, then why is it the headline?

We need individual stories. We need overviews. But in choosing to put this particular story on the front page with a headline and lead focusing on Sgt. Fountaine’s change of heart, the Globe uses his story inappropriately. IMO. [Tags: media iraq boston_globe]

Categories: Uncategorized dw