Reporter’s Feelings Apparently Hurt

Drudge links to this story in the Washington Post about the two soldiers who some Iraqis had claimed to have captured. The Pentagon, in this story, points out that the soldiers aren’t missing at all.

But the story points out:

LBC broadcast close-ups of the cards: one carrying the name of Capt. Katherine V. Rose of the 142nd Corps Support Battalion from Fort Polk, La., and a Pennsylvania driver’s license with the name Andrew C. Peters, 37. A call to the address on the driver’s license was answered by a person who hung up.

Why in the wide, wide world of sports did the reporter include that sentence? What sort of pavement-pounding (or Internet-searching-and telephoning) petulance prompts someone to point out that he or she got the abrupt brush off when he or she called the family of a serviceman reported as capture by probably psycho enemies? He or she’s probably lucky he or she only phoned; a slamming door might have bruised.

By putting the sentence in the story, the reporter wants our sympathy. He or she was trying to do his or her job, when this person out of Pennsylvania showed a lack of cosmopolitan sensibility and good breeding by refusing to emote publicly for Associated Press. Something our intrepid reporter thinks he or she has, and assumes we share.

Not likely.

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