David Bloom was not the first journalist to die while covering the war in Iraq, yet we felt differently about his death. It made me feel a new emotional truth being delivered by the electronic media in this conflict.

As we watched NBC news pay tribute to Bloom, who died suddenly while “embedded” with the U.S. Army’s Third Infantry, I was struck by our intense sense of both connection and loss.

On Sunday night, Tom Brokaw paid formal tribute: “He was on the front lines bringing back some of the most moving stories of the war. He was the consummate journalist.” Like his NBC colleagues, it felt to us, my wife and daughters, as though this were a personal loss, a death in the extended family that is created by the intimacy of televised coverage even of events half a world away. It was a loss absorbed in the context of numbing losses taking place amongst Iraqi civilians, but understood and felt in a different way.

Bloom talked to us from beside the soldiers of the Third Infantry, riding atop a troop carrier with his cameraman. It drew us closer, creating a more intimate bond between him, his viewers, and the pictures he chose to share with us.

He gave us intimacy with the U.S. troops. Bloom helped soldiers phone home, allowing officers, enlisted men, even special forces to reach back to their families through his satellite headset. We also know what they are experiencing on the dusty drive to Baghdad because he experienced it with them (present tense) including artillery attacks carried live: no narrative distancing or editing filters.

It’s only a matter of time, therefore, before, quite by coincidence, we experience real-time war deaths, perhaps of a television correspondent giving us an up-to-the minute report. This is the logical extension of the televised journalism first explored by Walter Cronkite in Vietnam. How fitting for one of the direct descendants of Edward R. Murrow’s emotionally real radio reporting to bring us into the era of video journalism.

The journalists embedded with coalition forces give us not only a political/military story, with its international repercussions for years to come. We are given a new intimacy with foreigners and precipitous events. It means that we are becoming a new kind of “coalition audience.” There is no gap between events and this audience, the gap of time and distance, nor the gap of intimacy. Hence the emotional reality of these news cycles. We are there. We are embedded in the action, as are people of every nationality the world over. Rather, there is no nationality to this coalition, except membership in the family of humankind.

We are experiencing the virtual texture of sand storms, exploding ordnance, or bullets pinging off of armor, but I am most struck by pictures of the breakthroughs of this humanity in unlikely places. There was the U.S. colonel, faced with a threatening Iraqi mob fearful that the soldiers were going to destroy their mosque. He instructed his troops to “take a knee.” They did. Then he commanded that they point their weapons at the ground. The U.S. warriors, in a powerful show of moral force, assumed a defensive posture. It was a balm to a tricky, hostile situation. No collateral damage, just collateral humanity.

Or the pictures of U.S. soldiers giving medical treatment to wounded enemy soldiers, much less Iraqi civilian men, women, and children.

This media simultaneity can be problematic, witness the professional gaffes of Peter Arnett and Geraldo Rivera, but we should embrace this new intimacy as the message of this medium to this age. These may be virtual experiences, but this emotional truth is real: We are embedded in the world, and it is embedded with us, if we can participate. Will we too be our brother’s liberator? Can we find a way to participate in the balming of Iraq?

Above and beyond the frought discourse on the rationale for waging war, we cannot say we are not involved with the fate of any family experiencing its effects, the family of an Iraqi mother or father; the family of the television reporter telling their story. Do we not see our own families reflected in their eyes?

Nothing is remote any more unless we keep it at a distance. This is at once the great promise of the electronic age, and the tyranny of its responsibility. We cannot say we didn’t know.

Perhaps this redeems television’s “vast wasteland” of faux “reality.” If the medium gives us a message, in real time, of our fragility, vulnerability, it is also a message about our powerful potential to do good. Then we are well compensated for the media?s reveling in the worst proclivities of our world. The camera?s lens is examining the depth of our own humanity.

Todd R. Nelson of Castine is associate editor of Hope magazine. He lives in Castine.