DAVID BLOOM was the kind of journalist who makes war personal. An NBC correspondent, he talked to ordinary soldiers doing ordinary things and brought their stories into America’s living rooms round the clock. Viewers got used to a very personal image of him, travelling across the desert in goggles on a tank-recovery vehicle, hair blowing in the wind, as he filed reports from the US Army’s 3rd Infantry Division in its push towards Baghdad.
His colleagues called it the “Bloom- mobile”. It was a specially rigged mobile satellite platform, an M88 tank-recovery vehicle that he had helped to design and which could transmit pictures while moving quickly. He filed so many reports that The Washington Post’s media critic, Howard Kurtz, called him “Iraq’s unofficial travel