Romenesko's News has a letter from journalist Constantine von Hoffman discussing whether there's been too much coverage of the death of journalists as compared to the deaths of coaltion soldiers or Iraqis:

Are journalists' death getting a disproportionate amount of attention?

This came to mind because of a few recent incidents in the Boston Globe. Last Friday, the Globe's story on Michael Kelly's death was a front page. In the Sunday Globe, the death of Benjamin Sammis, a helicopter pilot from Rehoboth, Mass., killed in action, was teased from page 1 with the actual story on page A-33. In today's Globe, (4/10) Kelly's funeral -- with picture -- was on page 1 of the Metro/Region section. I may have missed it (and that's not an attempt to be coy, just an admission that I may in fact have missed a story that ran) but I haven't seen any coverage of the funerals of the local soldiers who have died in Iraq. That may also be because their bodies have not yet been returned home.

While I don't believe this was intentional, the net result of these
placements reads as if one person's life is worth more than the other's.

I agree that deaths of journalists have gotten disproportionate coverage as compared to the coverage of coalition deaths. Part of that is a fact of journalism - some lives do matter more, in a news sense, than others. A housewife in the Bronx dying of heart failure isn't going to get the same coverage as, say, the death of someone like Barbra Striesand, even if of natural causes. One of the arguments made by the writer of this letter is that Kelly matters no more in his realm than Sammis mattered in his, and that's true. It's also true that in the broader realm of the Globe's readership, more would know of Kelly than Sammis.

But in another sense, von Hoffman is correct. The intense coverage of Kelly has as much to do with the journalists' connection to him as it does the actual objective news value. If Kelly's death had happened in, say, a car accident in Virginia or a heart attack on a tennis court, it would have received much less coverage. Journalists are sensitized to the risks of their comrades in a combat situation, and they are mourning and memorializing their dead within their own accustomed framework: In words and pictures. The other combat deaths - those of military personnel - are an anticipated part of their war coverage package that doesn't touch them personally. I don't mean by that to say that they don't care about the soldiers who die - I'm sure they do. This is about a comparison, not an effort to pillory the press on the coverage.

It speaks to some degree of media bias, however. They are affected by emotion, and they do make coverage decisions on that basis. This is just one example, albeit one that stands out because of the availability of the direct one to one comparison of death coverage. If the media wanted to be completely objective, they could have established a formula for dealing with war deaths (say, photo on front page always jumping to a specified inside page for details), and confined the coverage of Kelly's death to that same formula. Again, I'm not criticizing them for the broader coverage of Kelly's death. It's just important that they - and others - realize that the coverage was as a result of the death touching home to journalists more thoroughly than the deaths of military personnel did and do. They are in essence using their media outlets as a grieving mechanism - not a readership/community grief, as was the case with the 9/11 coverage, but a very personal grief centered in (although not limited to) the media community.