It was a chance concatenation of events that brought the funeral of Marine Sgt. Mark Adams of Cary and the 2,000th American death in Iraq in the same week, but the combination seemed to jangle readers' nerves.

Linda Green, a military wife from Hubert, N.C., was dismayed at pictures in The News & Observer of family members grieving at Adams' funeral last weekend: "While I realize the media has every right to attend these affairs to inform the public, and that Sergeant Adams died protecting that and other freedoms we daily take for granted, I found it to be in the utmost of distaste and downright rude to photograph a family at such a time, and then plaster that picture in the paper for the world to observe with their morning coffee."

(I'm not going to reproduce the photo here -- let's not amplify grief -- but you can view it on my blog at http://blogs.newsobserver.com/readers.)

Another caller was upset by coverage Wednesday of the 2,000-death milestone and of North Carolina congressmen calling for withdrawal from Iraq: "Doesn't anyone there realize that our boys over there, our grandson for one, they are trying to do a decent job and trying to do what is right? It just makes me sick that these kids are over there and people like this newspaper, all they do is bam, bam, bam."

There were many other calls, positive and negative, from folks reacting to the coverage.

The N&O gave more attention to Adams' death than it has to any other Iraq casualty, and I wondered why. Coverage included a front-page story on Oct. 18, with four pictures, and the funeral story last Sunday on the front of the City & State section, with four pictures including the wrenching photograph of his devastated parents.

Linda Williams, The N&O's deputy managing editor responsible for local news coverage, said the paper made a commitment before the war started to write a story about every serviceman or woman with North Carolina ties who is killed in Iraq. The Mark Adams story, she said, got extra attention because of the circumstances of his life, as well as the fact that his family had welcomed coverage. "I think Mark got more attention because it's local, the family invited us in and he had led a life that touched a lot of people in the community -- as a student (at Cary High School), as an athlete and as someone who worked in the community."

There is a line that a newspaper should not cross in terms of inserting itself, through notebook and camera, into a grieving family's private moments. You could argue that the close-up of Adams' sobbing father crossed that line -- except that the images were made with the family's permission. Robert Miller, The N&O's photo chief, says his photographers normally won't go to a funeral without the family's permission. The Adams family had invited The N&O to cover the funeral, and Mike Adams, Mark's older brother, said the family had no problem with the coverage. "We had told you you could take pictures," he told me. "To me, it was fine. You showed our grief."

That's how I justified the pictures to readers who called me. I thought the images communicated to the broader community that did not attend the funeral the human impact of a tragic loss in a way that words alone could not do. The coverage made Sgt. Mark Adams more than a statistic.

Which raises the question of whether it's the newspaper's job to portray the human dimension. Several readers were upset with The N&O for making a big deal of the 2,000-death milestone because, in their eyes, it was just another example of the media trying to cast the war and the Bush administration in a bad light. Why is death number 2,000 any more important than number 1,999?

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