Nightline on Friday
Current Affairs, Television 04/27/2004 |As I don’t do the TV thing I won’t be watching this, but for those of you who do, this Friday’s Nightline is looking to be a doozy.
From their daily e-mail update for today, April 27th 2004:
Now I want to tell you about this Friday’s broadcast. We’re going to do something different, something that we think is important. Friday night, we will show you the pictures, and Ted will read the names, of the men and women from the armed forces who have been killed in combat in Iraq. That’s it. That will be the whole broadcast.
…Whether you agree with the war or not, these men and women are serving, are putting their lives on the line, in our names. We think it is important to remember that those who have paid the ultimate price all have faces, and names, and loved ones. We thought about doing this on Memorial Day, but that’s a time when most media outlets do stories about the military, and they are generally lost in the holiday crush of picnics and all. We didn’t want this broadcast to get lost. Honestly, I don’t know if people will watch this for thirty seconds, or ten minutes, or at all. That’s not the point. We think this is important. These men and women have earned nothing less.
<
p>Wow. Powerful stuff.
(via Atrios)
iTunes: “Legion” by VNV Nation from the album Empires (2000, 5:11).
[See also: Pvt. Lynch refutes military rescue claims | Well, hey there, sailor! | Grey Tuesday followup | Links for August 7th through August 11th | Out at the Vogue ]
2 Responses to “Nightline on Friday”
Leave a Reply
fpz
Gavriel
medhat abbas
Ryan Waddell
Sponge Bob
April 27th, 2004 at 11:15 pm
Very cool. I remember when I read the names of the Vietnam dead from Montana, Wyoming, North and South Dakota, Washington and Oregon on one bitterly cold November day while still a student at Penn State. No one was around and I was at the busiest corner in the town; ‘course it WAS Thanksgiving day and I’d volunteered to take that watch - the states just went in order from East to West and I got those states’ dead soldiers names to read.
It’s terribly impressive when you actually read the name of someone who has died in combat and there are hundreds or thousands of them. It gets to be numbing and suddenly you realize there are no people anymore behind the names and all of a sudden the whole things seems like such a waste of lives. At that time my brother was a Marine stationed in DaNang. He’s still alive, thankfully!!
Hopefully Koppel is trying to do that.
April 28th, 2004 at 5:00 am
Due to the short length of the show, I think they’re only reading the names of the dead since March 19, or something like that… Still pretty poignant. And I bet it will be the highest rated Nightline in YEARS.