Talk:US military admits to accidentally killing Iraqi child

Title

Either it's singular, or plural, not both. - Amgine | ^talk 08:16, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

The title is also rather POV as it implies there is a policy that results in killing children rather than this having been an accidental killing. I can't come up with a short replacement at the moment. Watch the redirects when it is moved, I got one yesterday that was wrong and I had to fix it twice before I got it right.

Also, the Toronto Star requires a login to read, this can be easy to forget if your browser has cached the login credentials. The title does imply that this incident would only be mentioned as a footnote in the story though. Brian McNeil / ^talk 08:50, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

Not really, but you could add "accidentally" if you like.. no one would object if sources support it. - Nyarlathotep 09:22, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

US military admits accidentally killing Iraqi children. Good title?International 14:57, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

Should be fine. Or "US military admits to accidental killing Iraqi children" Never sure about grammer in titles.

I believe zarkawi(whatever) said the Jordan bombings did not mean to target a wedding party. Should we start assuming/saying killings are accidents when somebody says they are? "admits killing" is the fact here..an admission and a killing; those are the facts. we can add they say it's accidental in the story itself. Or next we'll have to be saying "AL-Queda admits accidently bombing a wedding party". Neutralizer 22:26, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

Oh, here its just a matter of taste, Brianmc's to be precise, and likely MrM's too. Its natural that the U.S. would claim that its accidental, so it doesn't really need to be mentioned. As its less obvious that Zarkawi would say this about the wedding party, its clearly a higher priority to mention it in your case. Nyarlathotep 18:34, 26 November 2005 (UTC)

I have moved the article to a less sensational title. If you read the provided source articles closely, the US military has only admitted to killing a child (singular), so there's no need for "children". Lankiveil 02:39, 26 November 2005 (UTC).

cynical

Maybe I am a little too cynical here, but why exactly is this news? --vonbergm 06:54, 26 November 2005 (UTC)

What is your point? Children being shot is not news to you? - Apollyon 18:03, 26 November 2005 (UTC)

I guess I should be more precise. By all means, this should be reported. The danger with reporting on single instances like this is that the act of reporting one out of many instances implicitely negates all the others. There are no reliable estimates of civilian deaths in Iraq. But compare the amount of reporting a couple of civilians that got shot at checkpoints get to the civilians that died in, say, Faluujah. In the first instance, there happened to be an embedded journalist at the scene to report. In the second we only have some picutres and a rough estimate (the guardian estimated about 1000 a couple of days ago). Reporting on only single instances makes it seem like the other's don't exist. Stylizing this to be a 'news' item negates to nature of this war. In a war people die. Civilians die. Children die. In a broader sense, this is only 'news' because we forget all the other civilians that die every day. They die at the hands of the insurgency (we got pretty good coverage on the incidents and the numbers) and through US weapons (we have no reliable estimates on numbers here, especially when it comes to bombing which costs the most civilian lives).

As I said, these events should be reported. But I am also frustrated with what is not reported on (or not reportable because there is no reliable information). --vonbergm 19:07, 26 November 2005 (UTC)