Two Faces of Death: Near and Far

From Oklahoma City to South Lebanon, are those faces in the rubble?

When the destruction is vast, individual victims and those who mourn them often become faceless in the blur of carnage.

So what a valuable, sweet, lovely piece Wednesday by CNN’s Bonnie Anderson about the husband and young son of a woman who died in the Oklahoma City bombing exactly a year ago and how this tragedy has bound them into a tight family unit even though they are not related biologically.

Navigating that very fine line between honest reporting and exploitative sentiment is no easy task when conveying such an emotional topic, but Anderson’s delicate questioning and shaping of the material were superb. Whatever you felt, you did so because of what this emotionally scarred family of two said, did and symbolized, not because of what you were manipulated into feeling.

Also notable was the report’s extended length, its respect for the devoutly religious and the manner in which Anderson kept herself out of the story, not appearing on camera (although she was heard asking questions)--thus not eclipsing or drawing attention from her worthy subjects or the poignancy of their message.

A message more important than the messenger? Utter heresy. Such careful crafting and selfless reporting by TV news is an exception these days.

As is the personalizing of grief when the catastrophe occurs abroad. Especially in a Lebanese culture less fathomable to U.S. viewers than a pretty young mother from Oklahoma City whose wedding videotape can be played on CNN so that we can see the elation on her face and ponder the irony of the vows she recited (“till death us do part”) just a year before a lunatic bomber made her death a reality. Weren’t many of us and our friends and children married in similar ceremonies?

No wedding videos with smiling brides in white for any of the scores of casualties (the body count was still swelling as this was written) in Thursday’s Israeli shelling of a United Nations camp housing many Lebanese civilians. Lots of human wreckage, though.

They had sought safety in the camp at Qana from earlier Israeli air and artillery strikes made in response to the Katyusha rockets that Hezbollah guerrillas have been firing on Israel. Remaining to be sorted out were reports of Israel saying the hit on civilians was accidental and the U.N. saying that, just prior to the shelling, at least one Katyusha rocket had been fired from a point only several hundred yards from those U.N.-housed civilians.

No network preemptions for live coverage either, except for eternally vigilant, fast-reacting CNN, which early in the morning aired extensive live reports of the tragedy featuring Brent Sadler in Tyre, Lebanon, and Walt Rodgers on the Israel-Lebanon border and followed later with live coverage of the statement and press conference by Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, in which he expressed sorrow for the casualties but blamed Hezbollah.

In between, CNN filled the screen with vivid footage of twisted, bloodied remains of the dead, some of whom were displayed for the camera by wailing Lebanese. The anguish and the bodies were a horrible spectacle.

Yet this was not Oklahoma City, where an entire nation was stunned and in grief over last year’s bombing of a federal building that took 168 lives, a calamity that CNN was planning to note with extensive live coverage throughout today. Nor was it Europe, site of the cataclysmic Nazi-driven Holocaust that many are commemorating this week.

This was Lebanon, about which most Americans know little beyond the chaos and violence that periodically explode there. Thus, victims of this horror, as great as it was, would be anonymous masses to most of us, dehumanized in death, not individuals with whom we could empathize.

Or perhaps even deem worthy of much initial coverage. On KNBC-TV Channel 4’s 11 a.m. news, the Lebanon bloodshed was the newscast’s third story, getting about 20 seconds. It got a minute at the top of KABC-TV Channel 7’s newscast at 11:30 a.m. On KCBS-TV Channel 2’s noon newscast, it did earn two minutes as lead story.

And how swiftly the political story overtook the human story, with pontificating diplomats, think-tankers and other specialists moving in, as if those strewn bodies had become a mere subtext to larger Middle East intrigues and militant saber-rattling.

In that regard, CNN immediately bent its weekday-morning legal series, “Burden of Proof,” to this breaking story about which its two lawyer hosts, Gretta Van Susteran and Roger Cossack, appeared to have no special knowledge. They and their hastily assembled panel were soon hermetically sealed inside their own polite dialogue on international law.

Perhaps many would like to mentally join them as a way of fleeing from the ripped flesh and spilled blood that we so regularly encounter via TV, which daily pulls its own blankets from corpses as those surviving Lebanese did to show cameras their dead friends and loved ones at that shelled U.N. compound.

On Thursday, CNN worked in another fine Anderson story, recalling “a mother’s despair” over the loss of her two small sons in the federal building bombing, showing home videos of them and reporting a postscript of mixed success for the oft-interviewed woman and her husband.

CNN is calling its coverage today “Oklahoma City Remembered.” But a year from now, who will remember Qana, Lebanon?