Gratuitous: Ted Koppel will devote an entire "Nightline" program to reading the names of those killed in combat in Iraq.

In a conscious echo of a famous, Vietnam War-era issue of Life magazine, the ABC News program "Nightline" will broadcast Friday night the names and faces of every soldier killed by hostile fire since the start of the war in Iraq.

. . . "I have always felt, and I said it when I was in Iraq last year, that the most important thing a journalist can do is remind people of the cost of war," Mr. Koppel said in a telephone interview yesterday.

Ah, yes: the self-imporatant journalist routine again. I always thought "the most important thing a journalist can do" was to report on the news, not perform feats of semi-serious grandstanding. Here's a nice loaded comment from Koppel in the New York Observer:

"I see it more as a Rorschach test," said Mr. Koppel. "At one and the same time, it pays respect and honor to the young men and women who have died. And on the other hand people will take from this, I think, a reflection of what they bring to it.

Pure crap. Look, pro-war, anti-war, whatever your bag is -- this performance is transparently ghoulish sensationalism draped in the robes of public service. It makes me sick. Koppel's an idiot.

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