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teacherone
03-11-2011, 11:08 AM
Viral post pits coverage of Sheen, fallen soldiers
By Wayne Drash, CNN (http://afghanistan.blogs.cnn.com/2011/03/10/viral-post-pits-coverage-of-sheen-fallen-soldiers/)

It started with a Facebook status update. Upset at the media's coverage of Charlie Sheen, someone took up for American soldiers dying in Afghanistan.

"Charlie Sheen is all over the news because he's a celebrity drug addict," it said, "while Andrew Wilfahrt 31, Brian Tabada 21, Rudolph Hizon 22, Chauncy Mays 25, are soldiers who gave their lives this week with no media mention. Please honor them by posting this as your status for a little while."

The status update has since gone viral, shared by tens of thousands on Facebook. An abbreviated version is on Twitter.

When a friend of mine posted the message on her Facebook page, it was a sobering reminder of the news media’s failings of covering the Afghanistan war. I kept returning to the names of the four soldiers. Who were these men? What’s their story?

http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2011/images/03/10/t1larg.soldiers.split.usarmy.jpg

acptulsa
03-11-2011, 11:27 AM
Yeah, to some degree a news station suffers in ratings when it airs news rather than fluff--especially when the news is as depressing as it has been for the last decade. That said, there really is no excuse for a news outlet to cover Sheen in preference to actual news.