To be clear, when I had earlier written that the Canadian press seemed more willing to "show more" than the American press of bodies, I was in that case referring to, you know, bodies, as in images of bodies in extremis, images akin to those from Mogadishu, where dead American soldiers are being dragged through the streets, or the Fallujah images, where the contractors mutilated bodies were hung from bridges.

What about the kind of stories under discussion here, of the rituals surrounding the treatment of our honored dead, a different category altogether? First, I don't know it's true such stories have been entirely missing from the American press, or as absent as suggested here. (Although your impression of how much attention this category has received, and this is speculative on my part, may have something to do with where you live. If you're in an area where there are a number of military bases, you may have seen more of these stories, but it may be that they're handled primarily by the local press. Certainly they are more present in the print press.)

Second, I agree with Marc that there's no question the Canadian press focuses on this more. My sense is impressionistic, to be sure, since I don't see the Canadian press every day, but my sense matches with Marc's: it looks to me that there's coverage when a casket leaves Afghanistan, when it arrives in Canada, and then of the funeral itself. The question you have to ask yourself is whether that's an appropriate degree of coverage. Don't get me wrong: I'm all about due recognition for the military. But when there isn't adequate coverage of what the mission is for, and what the mission is accomplishing, then this becomes all about loss, loss, loss, and a way to push that message into the public's consciousness in the most brutally emotional way possible.

Let me be blunt: there is a strain of rhetoric afoot in both countries which infantalizes the troops, which frames them as victims, so that an inversion takes place. They are no longer trained professionals, whose job it is to defend the nation, but poor (probably in both senses of the word) "kids," who need us to defend them, by bringing them out of harm's way. The Canadian coverage of every single funeral ritual fits into this overall rhetorical theme -- and it's one thing to honor our fallen, but I don't know how you sustain a war when the nation are led to feel each loss in this way. It isn't about respect, it isn't about how deeply you feel the tragedy of each loss, it's about the quality of the emotion, if that makes sense, whether the focus is only on the loss itself -- a life, a promise unfulfilled -- or something more.

I've argued before that, for the American public, combat casualties remain acceptable so long as there is a belief that they are justified. I don't know what the research says about Canadian public opinion, but I can't imagine it's that far different, and I have also noticed that there is often in the Canadian coverage a focus on the casualties to a neglect of what has been accomplished (much as in our own coverage.)

This is in part a function of the fact that, unless things have changed very recently, the Canadian press are not allowed to go "outside the wire," whether they want to or not, by their editors and producers. My understanding is that this has created some real tensions between their press and their military, as it has sometimes seemed that their press is simply waiting for patrols to return so they can get a casualty count. So while I'm sure there's a robust debate over the mission in Canada, the question is how well informed that debate is by adeq. coverage of what the Canadian forces are out in the field doing. My information may be a few months out of date, but it is certainly the case that this has been a limitation on the coverage in the past. I would ask the Canadians participating here -- how often do you see news reports filed by CBC or other broadcast reporters embedded with the troops?