A ray of hope in COM 209

Communications 209 is our basic newswriting class at SCI, and I've assigned some of my COM 209 students to write up a class they're attending ... if they can't get out of it to cover a presentation on campus by the Springfield Election Commission at the same time, they can do a story on the class. Think it's impossible? Well, Julia Keller, cultural critic for The Chicago Tribune, is taking a 400-level English lit class at DePaul University and writing it up for Tempo, the newspaper's lifestyle section. Here's how she begins her story about a typical class on the 18th-century writer Jonathan Swift:

The sky was garbage-can gray, a dirty, depressing shade that made the prospect of a three-hour-and-fifteen-minute class on a long-dead but somehow still long-winded author downright grim.

For the first five classes, the commute from downtown Chicago to DePaul's Lincoln Park campus had generally occurred under cheerful skies and mild temperatures. Last Wednesday, however, winter finally cracked the whip. Snow fell with a vengeance. The chilly air had a defiant bite to it. And the steps down into the Red Line tunnel at Grand Avenue were awash in that sloshy-sloppy-soppy-soupy mix of water, salt and the darkly undifferentiated crud that adheres indelibly to trouser cuffs.

You should understand that I've always been unduly susceptible to the portentous implications of weather. I regard it as a personal omen.

Clear skies obviously mean the mission is destined for success. Relentless snow, scimitar winds or excessive rain can only be interpreted as signs that I should give up, turn back, go home.

So Keller dreaded going to class. Sound familiar? You don't have to have sunny skies and a perfect day at the beach to make a story interesting. Ordinary, crummy winter weather will do.

Now, watch how Keller sets up the rest of the column:

So on I trudged, emerging from the Fullerton stop to make my weary way to McGaw Hall. My backpack grew soggier by the second. My mood was disintegrating even more rapidly. Had you leaned close to me, you would have heard a muttered, slightly insane-sounding chant: Jonathan Swift, who needs ya? Jonathan Swift, who needs ya? Jonathan Swift . ...

And yet, at the risk of turning this into a morality tale so neat and prim and predictable that it makes parents swoon and kids grimace, honesty forces me to report: Once I got to class, once Professor Todd Parker started his typically enthralling lecture on the vivid particulars of Swift's world, the old educational magic reasserted itself and even wet socks were forgotten.

The class, she says, "was pure enchantment." Yet it wasn't Parker's lecture that got to her. It was a chance remark that sent her on her way thinking the class was worth fighting the "el" in winter weather. Keller says it was:

... one of those classroom moments -- rare, splendid, unpredictable -- when the professor went off-road, as it were, and leaned back in his chair and gently hitched the 18th Century to the 21st: "As a professor of the humanities, I work in the one college that produces nothing useful." There were a few chuckles. Parker continued: "The humanities don't produce products. They produce individuals. Other colleges -- engineering, computers -- create instrumental knowledge. But the college of arts and sciences creates the context that makes that instrumental knowledge meaningful."

Emerging from McGaw Hall just after 9 p.m., we discovered that the winter weather wasn't quite so menacing anymore. Snow descended in great, wet, fat, fairy-tale flakes, like an earnest benediction, and the world seemed both very, very old and very, very new.

Keller, by the way, has won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. It's with writing like that she did it.

PLEASE NOTE: If you're in COM 209 and don't have a class at 2 p.m. Tuesday, March 7, your assignment is still to cover the presentation on the city's new voting machines in Becker Library.

UPDATE (March 2): The assignment is off ... turns out I have a standing meeting of the faculty Assessment Committee Tuesday afternoon, so I won't be able to attend the Election Commission's presentation. (The theory, of course, is that assessment is part of instruction and doesn't get in its way. But that's a topic for another day.) You're still urged to cover something -- including maybe Tuesday's dog-and-pony show -- before the end of spring break.

UPDATE ADD 1 (March 3): The event is now rescheduled for 12:45 p.m Wednesday, March 8. As far as I'm concerned, the specific assignment is still off. But you still need to write a feature story over spring break.

More Baghdad bloggers

Aljazeera.net, the online service of the Arabic TV station al Jazeera, posted a good article to its website today on bloggers operating in Iraq today. It quotes Salam Pax, the "Bagdhad blogger" who helped bring blogging to worldwide attention during the U.S. invasion of Iraq. But it makes it clear blogging in Iraq didn't end when his first blog went on hiatus during the breakdown of civil order in Iraq a year after the invasion. Even Salam Pax is back, with a blog called "Shut Up, You Fat Whiner" that's been up on Blogspot intermittently since the late summer of 2004.

Bloggers, according to Aljazeera.net, can "give a voice to the community that they say often goes unheard in Western media." The difference is palpable:

Salam Adil, 38, an Iraqi blogger who lives in the United Kingdom, says: "I compared reporting from the BBC and the British newspapers to the [Iraqi] blogs and there is a world of difference.

"It is as if the Western media are on a different planet," he told Aljazeera.net.

The ongoing disturbances since the partial destruction of the al-Askari shrine last week have been particularly hard for Western -- or Iraqi -- news media to cover. And bloggers were able to report from places the journalists couldn't get to. But they reflect the divisions in Iraqi society. Says Aljazeera.net:

Although the blogs have helped Iraqis communicate their hopes for Iraq’s future, they don’t always speak with the same voice, and there is often much debate, with conspiracy theories and humour thrown in.

Blogger Hammorabi wrote that the "barbaric and savage attack on the Shrine of Imam Al-Hassan Al-Askari in Samarra is a continuation of the barbarism of the Saudi Wahhabi terrorism".

But A Free Iraqi blamed the violence on politicians who "keep inflaming those already existing divisions for their own benefit, as they represent nothing but ethnic and sectarian hatred".

At the bottom of the story are links to 10 bloggers (Zeyad, Baghdad Treasure, 24 Steps to Liberty, Fayrouz Hancock, Riverbend, Hammorabi, Salam Pax, Salam Adil, A Free Iraqi and Iraq Blog Count). I've been spending way too much time surfing them, and al Jazeera's right: They give a picture of life in Iraq that not even Juan Cole can get at and the commercial Western media can no longer even try.

Words to live by

An effective quote from The Charlotte Observer's obituary of Don Knotts, who died Friday at the age of 81. (The story was syndicated and picked up by The Miami Herald.) A wonderful comic actor, Knotts played Deputy Barney Fife to Andy Griffith's Sheriff Andy Taylor of the fictional Mayberry, N.C. Look at the way staff writer Mark Washburn of The Observer sets it up:

"Originally, I was supposed to be funny," Griffith recalled in a 2003 interview with the Observer. "I noticed on the second episode that Don was funny and I should be straight. That set it up, and I played straight to the rest."

Griffith added that he never regretted making that adjustment. "The straight man has the best part," he said. "He gets to be in the show and see it, too."

Sheriff Taylor and Barney Fife couldn't have done a better job of setting up the quote.

Insightful blog story, cute sidebar

That story on blogs in the Feb. 20 issue of New York magazine is a must read. Its writer, Clive Thompson, paints a nuanced picture, too, so I'll quote the nut graf in some detail:

By all appearances, the blog boom is the most democratized revolution in media ever. Starting a blog is ridiculously cheap; indeed, blogging software and hosting can be had for free online. There are also easy-to-use ad services that, for a small fee, will place advertisements from major corporations on blogs, then mail the blogger his profits. Blogging, therefore, should be the purest meritocracy there is. It doesn’t matter if you’re a nobody from the sticks or a well-connected Harvard grad. If you launch a witty blog in a sexy niche, if you’re good at scrounging for news nuggets, and if you’re dedicated enough to post around the clock—well, there’s nothing separating you from the big successful bloggers, right? I can do that.

In theory, sure. But if you talk to many of today’s bloggers, they’ll complain that the game seems fixed. They’ve targeted one of the more lucrative niches—gossip or politics or gadgets (or sex, of course)—yet they cannot reach anywhere close to the size of the existing big blogs. It’s as if there were an A-list of a few extremely lucky, well-trafficked blogs—then hordes of people stuck on the B-list or C-list, also-rans who can’t figure out why their audiences stay so comparatively puny no matter how hard they work. “It just seems like it’s a big in-party,” one blogger complained to me. ...

No reason not to blog, as I see it. But plenty of reason to realize you're not going to get rich doing it. The high-traffic blogs, like Arianna Huffington's celebrity blog, tend to be corporate and very professional. Says Thompson:

... the rapid rise of the Huffington Post represents a sort of death knell for the traditional blogger. The Post wasn’t some site thrown up by a smart, bored Williamsburg hipster who just happened to hit a cultural nerve. It was the product of a corporation—carefully planned, launched, and promoted. This is now the model for success: Of Technorati’s top ten blogs, nearly half were created in the same corporate fashion, part of the twin blog empires of Jason Calacanis and Nick Denton.

“The good news is that it’s still possible to create a top-ranked blog,” says Shirky. “The bad news is, the way to get into the top ten now seems to be public relations.” Just posting witty entries and hoping for traffic won’t do it. You have to actively seek out attention from the press. “That’s how they’re jump-starting the links structure. It’s not organic.” Indeed, when Huffington announced her venture and her celebrity guests [including novelists Norman Mailer and Nora Ephron], bloggers grumbled that it weirdly inverted the whole grassroots appeal of blogs.

And now the cute part. There's a sidebar called "Five Blogs to Check Out." The top listing goes to a website called Cute Overload with lots of pictures of kittens, puppies, bunnies, duckies, hamsters, ferrets and other little bundles of fluff and fur, all narrated with a tone that somehow manages to be both suitably edgy and, well, cute.

PR: rooted in media relations

Toward the end of an otherwise unremarkable column on an art gallery opening in London, Julian Henry of the British public relations firm Henry's House, suggests PR boils down to human relations:

If you were to reduce the role of the PR consultant to its most basic function what do you have? The man or woman on the phone whose job is simply to offer a description of their client's product in a topical, creative and engaging way.

It's a horrible truth that the more you work for major brand clients, the more likely you are to be dragged away from this pure and poetic form of public relations and sucked into an awful machine that denies spontaneous thought and starts the process of immediate corruption of intent.

To be a great publicist you must start by thinking as a journalist. This means creating stories, working to deadlines, moving quickly through the trees of the jungle, engaging people by being interesting, and, most unfashionably, having a mind that likes to question what is put in front of you.

Human relations, if you're in PR, consists largely of media relations:

PR people who don't regularly talk to journalists should go and work in advertising. It's that simple. Selling a story to a sceptical hack is important because it forces you to be exposed to the realities of the world. And any PR agency without this at the heart of their culture will quickly lose touch. ...

Like anybody else who's got an idea to sell, Henry probably goes a little overboard here. But he's got a point when he says "the art of good PR is rooted in the ability to inspire through personal contact, and not through pages of scripted corporate gobbledegook."

An integrated marketing plan for peace?

Here's the kind of thing you can find while surfing the web during a long weekend --

While I was surfing around New York magazine's cover story and sidebars on blogging (which I will post on later, after I've absorbed it better), I came across an article headlined "How to Reposition a Brand Called ‘Peace.’" New age guru Deepak Chopra, it seems, is teaming up with former Coca-Cola executive Jeff Dunn, now CEO of Ubiquity Brands, the Chicago-based diversified food products company that counts Jay's Potato Chips among its holdings. Their product? Peace.

According to Jada Yuan of New York, Chopra's nonprofit Alliance for Humanity wants to sell the ideas of "taking care of the environment, helping the poor achieve economic parity, making sure human rights are protected, and finding nonviolent means of conflict resolution” like, well, like potato chips. He recruited Dunn over a lunch meeting with Dunn and his wife. As Dunn told the story, “my wife Sue said, ‘You’re trying to do what Jeff did for Coke. You’re trying to brand peace!’ And I literally watched the lightbulb go on over [Chopra's] head.”

So how do you reposition peace in the marketplace? Yuan reports:

Dunn ticks off the three stages to brand development: identifying your target audience, positioning your brand, and, finally, “activating” the consumer—who progresses from product trial to brand loyalty. The target audience here is the easy part. They’re the people Dunn refers to as “conscious consumers,” those who, given a choice between two similar products, choose the one made by a company with better social and environmental policies. Still, citing a Sustainability Institute report, Dunn says only 3 or 4 percent of consumers worldwide do this consistently. Dunn thinks if they can get that number up to 10 percent, “we’d see a sea change relative to the degradation of the planet.”

But wait, there's more. Dunn wants to create a new logo -- turn the old peace sign upside down, so it looks sort of like a tree. And more importantly, he wants to work with credit card companies and NGOs (non-governmental organizations) like Save the Children to reach people who are open to this kind of marketing appeal. Yuan adds:

With or without the alliance logo, Chopra believes consumerism can trump geopolitics. “For example,” says Chopra, “if we could get India and Pakistan and Kashmir to see that there’s a huge economic incentive for Kashmir to be the Switzerland of the East, the ski resort of the world in that area, then maybe they’ll see that it doesn’t matter what flag they fly over it.”

If it sounds wild-eyed and visionary, that may be because that's exactly what it is.

But Chopra, who can be wild-eyed and visionary himself, knows a thing or two about marketing. A physician who grew up and was educated in India, he has made a bundle off of books on transcendental meditation, holistic medicine and books with titles like Creating Affluence: Wealth Consciousness in the Field of All Possibilities; The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success; Grow Younger, Live Longer: 10 Steps to Reverse Aging and, most recently, Peace Is the Way: Bringing War and Violence to an End.

Writer takes aim at Cheney, media

In an essay on Vice President Cheney's hunting accident for the online edition of Time magazine, novelist and literary critic Walter Kirn suggested "Cheney's gross negligence ... still needs more exploring." But he saved his heaviest ammunition for the national press corps' coverage of "a story that hinges on a chaotic Texas quail shoot." Kirn, who grew up in Minnesota and now works in New York, said big-city reporters just don't get it right when they stray out into the rest of the country:

What's made this awkward reporting not merely annoying but socially and politically divisive is that it insults the intelligence of some people who already feel insulted in other ways by the very same class of urban journalists. Outside of DC, LA and NYC, the only time folks get to meet a correspondent from a major television network or a writer from a leading newspaper is when a storm has just destroyed their neighborhood. And when the big shots do vist the outland, they always dress wrong, covered in either condescending denim or some haughty blend of wool and silk. Then they call the tornado that struck the place a "cyclone," even though the place is Minnesota and Minnesotans don't use that word.

That sounds about right. I remember once when the national press descended on an East Tennessee manhunt, local reporters (I was one of them) tried to convince them they shouldn't call the countryside a "rattlesnake-infested wilderness." Copperhead-infested, maybe, because parts of it in fact were pretty snaky. But we didn't have rattlesnakes in that part of the state.

I don't hunt, but I suspect Kirn's also got it right when he adds:

For me and for lots of westerners I've spoken to, the greatest failure of the accident coverage has been its inability to convey, let alone fathom in the first place, just what goes on when people are chasing birds out in the middle of nowhere, in the brush, with dogs and other hunters on every side and adrenaline pumping through everybody's veins. It's a jittery, fluid situation. The coveys erupt without warning and they don't fly straight, meaning hunters don't only have to be prepared to raise their barrels at any instant, they need an awareness of the potential arcs through which they can safely swing them before they fire. Or hold their fire, as the case may be.

And what of Cheney? A hunter himself, Kirn says quail hunting is dangerous, but "it's a civilized level of danger that's usually manageable through good equipment, experienced companions, and traditional codes of conduct." Cheney may have been negligent or unlucky, or both. But Kirn says his problem with the Vice President's hunting accident goes beyond that:

[Hunting] is like war, ... but it's also unlike war, mostly because the quarry poses no threat. In a time of actual war — and when one of the hunters helps to run that war — the playfulness of the sport may seem distasteful. To shoot at feathered things while obliging other folks to shoot at much larger creatures that shoot back doesn't seem right somehow, or wise. At some poetic level it tempts the gods, and the gods are always armed. For Cheney, that's the painful, humbling part. For the public, it's the engrossing, mythic part. The press may be mauling the story and prolonging it, but the accident's strange allegorical allure is beyond its power to affect.

Who says grammar isn't important?

A borough council or city government in England misspelled the street name outside a grammar school, according to a story in The Guardian today, and the mistake wasn't caught until it was noticed by, well, the 4- to 11-year-old students in the grammar school.

The name of the street? Grammar School Lane (the sign painters spelled it "Grammer," if you want to know).

Here's what Gillian Taylor, headteacher at Yarm Prepratory School in Stockton-on-Tees in the northeast of England, told the Press Association, the British equivalent of AP:

"The sign was up for quite a number of days and it caused quite a lot of amusement for children, staff and parents.

"We saw the sign and thought 'no, it can't be,' and then you look again just to make sure.

"Fortunately the children spotted the mistake quite quickly, but it must have been a good eight or nine days before the council removed it."

Mrs Taylor added: "If the council wants any help in spelling then I'm sure the children can help."

Gov, state rep on comedy show

Is politics getting more like entertainment, or is entertainment getting more political? Both, apparently, at least judging by Gov. Rod Blagojevich's recent appearance on the popular "Daily Show." A Associated Press story picked up Feb. 10 by The Chicago Sun-Times described him as he "sometimes looking befuddled and other times trying to sound witty himself," but he got a lot of free election-year publicity out of it. Here's how the AP wrote it up:

In a segment titled "Pill of Rights," interviewer Jason Jones' first jab was aimed at the governor's notoriously hard-to-pronounce name.

"I sat down with Gov. Blago, Blagaaaa . . . Gov. Smith," Jones said in a voiceover.

Blagojevich began the prerecorded interview by offering a straight-faced explanation of the order he issued requiring pharmacies to sell approved contraceptives such as the morning-after pill without delay.

As the governor began, "I think it's important for your listeners to know that we're not talking about medicine that terminates pregnancies, we're talking about . . . ," Jones interrupted, saying sternly, "I'll be in charge of what my listeners get to hear."

"Is he teasing me, or is that legit?" Blagojevich asked smiling as he looked toward someone off camera.

Also reaping publicity out of the show was state Rep. Ron Stephens, R-Greenville, whose interview was edited into a comedy skit featuring an exaggeratedly seductive blonde (it had to be a blonde!) who flounces into a pharmacy and says, "Hey, big boy. ... Here's my prescription for the morning-after pill."

In the skit as edited, Stephens states his opposition to morning-after pills while the blonde jiggles and flounces. In real life, Stephens owns two pharmacies, and he opposes Blagojevich on the issue. The story continues:

Stephens told The (Springfield) State Journal-Register Wednesday that he fully understood the "Daily Show" could end up ridiculing him by heavily editing the questions and answers. He said the interviews were taped at his office and a pharmacy.

"It was a chance to do a comedy show," he said. "It's not so much about the issue ... I take my issues very seriously, but I've never taken myself so seriously that I can't laugh at myself."

It wasn't great television, but it was good politics for both officials. And in a day when the boundaries between news, commentary and entertainment are increasingly blurred, it was certainly a sign of the times.

Can political strife lead to cultural dialog?

One interesting thing about the uproar over the recent publication of cartoons insulting to Muslims is that it hasn't cut across the usual political lines. Especially in Europe, conservatives have come out as champions of a free press while liberals have counseled restraint, a real turnaround for many on both sides. So it is that Jonathan Steele, senior foreign correspondent for The Guardian, a center-left British dailly that has been sharply critical of the Iraq war, in a column Saturday praised U.S. President George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair for their role in the controversy.

After noting that Bush "continues to inflame many Muslims with his sabre-rattling over Iran," Steele said in in this instance Bush and the Americans have a lot to teach Europe:

The fact is that on the cartoon issue the great neocon [Bush] and his ideological advisers were pragmatic and smart enough to see that the drawings were in poor taste, deliberately provocative and grotesquely inaccurate in suggesting that every Muslim is a murderous would-be martyr and, worse still, that the Qur'an advocates suicide bombing.

Bush's reaction shows that Americans have a better understanding of multiculturalism than most Europeans. Racial, religious and ethnic discrimination are obviously still present in the United States, but its long history of mass immigration, as well as the American constitution's emphasis on individual rights regardless of origin, led Americans long ago to come to terms with the cultural differences within their rainbow nation and celebrate diversity. E pluribus unum - "unity from many" - as their motto puts it.

Steele said the reaction in Muslim countries, rioting from Africa to Southeast Asia that left at least 13 people dead, does not diminish the need for cool-headedness and tolerance of cultural differences.

Much of the rioting, he said, was politically motivated. He drew on his long experience reporting from the world's capitals and battlefields, to sketch in the outlines:

Here too it is important to keep cool. The cartoon row is being seized on by people with a gamut of special agendas. In Gaza, the first protesters who attacked EU offices were not from Hamas but were hotheads linked to the defeated Fatah movement as well as Islamic Jihad and others who never contested last month's elections. The protesters may have wanted to embarrass Hamas or snatch the limelight for their own movements.

In Iran, the deliberately confrontational new president is exploiting what he sees as yet another way of keeping grassroots support. He came in on a platform of promises to help the economic underclass but has failed to deliver, even as Iranian capital flees the country, the stock market falters and investors hold back on new projects in fear of war with the United States. What easier diversion than despicable denials of the Holocaust and synthetic tirades about the cartoons being a western conspiracy?

In Lebanon, anti-Syrian politicians use the crisis to denounce Damascus for allegedly getting marchers to burn the Danish embassy in Beirut - a charge which feeds into the frantic internal power struggles that are paralysing Lebanon's current government. And let us not forget that the protests against Denmark began in conservative Wahhabi Saudi Arabia, which has a broadly pro-western foreign policy. Even the Saudis only reacted after Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Danish prime minister, refused to receive a protest delegation of Danish Islamic leaders and ambassadors from Muslim countries. The Danish government's insensitivity and rudeness were almost as offensive as the cartoons.

Much of last week's crisis, in other words, was about politics. And politicians trying to make hay of it.

But resolution of the discord, Steele said, won't come from the politicians:

A huge responsibility now rests on the mainstream European media. The extremist slogans carried during the anti-cartoon protests do not represent the views of all Muslims and should not be portrayed as such. Moderate Muslim leaders in European countries have been speaking out all week to urge restraint and condemn the protesters' violence, just as in Britain they condemned Abu Hamza's incitement to murder long before the courts did. The trouble is that these long-standing tensions and arguments in Muslim communities where voices of moderation have consistently sought to counter the radicals were rarely reported. Extremism is a better story.

Muslims are not only an important part of Europe's new diversity. They are diverse among themselves. To suggest that, because almost all of Europe's Muslims felt offended by the cartoons, they all support slogans calling for revenge and beheadings is as inaccurate as it is for people in Muslim countries to claim that every European approved the cartoons' publication. There are liberals, conservatives, modernisers and traditionalists in all communities, just as there are those who know the bounds of good taste and bigots who do not.

Now the provocation looks like it may be about over, it's important the resulting dialog continues. It's just as important in the U.S. as it is in Europe.

Fisk: Cartoon row childish, dangerous

Love him or hate him, you can't ignore Robert Fisk if you try to follow events in the Middle East. Irish by birth and education, he has been a war correspondent there since the early 1980s. He lives in Beirut, he speaks fluent Arabic and he sympathizes deeply with the Arab people if not always their governments. Thus he is often seen as anti-Israeli and anti-American, and he tends not to mince his words. But when he speaks, I listen. Even when I don't agree with him.

So I pricked up my ears last week when I saw an article picked up by PalestineChronicle.com, a website maintained by Arab-Americans in Seattle, on the unholy row over cartoons caricaturing the Prophet Muhammad:

So now it's cartoons of the Prophet Mohamed with a bomb-shaped turban. Ambassadors are withdrawn from Denmark, Gulf nations clear their shelves of Danish produce, Gaza gunmen threaten the European Union. In Denmark, Fleming Rose, the "culture" editor of the pip-squeak newspaper which published these silly cartoons - last September, for heaven's sake - announces that we are witnessing a "clash of civilizations" between secular Western democracies and Islamic societies. This does prove, I suppose, that Danish journalists follow in the tradition of Hans Christian Anderson.

In other words, Fisk is saying, the newspapermen believe in fairy tales.

"Oh lordy, lordy," Fisk adds, using an Irish expression not often heard in political analysis. "What we're witnessing is the childishness of civilizations."

Fisk goes on to add the difference is one of values, not of free speech. "This is not an issue of secularism versus Islam," he says. "For Muslims, the Prophet is the man who received divine words directly from God. We see our prophets as faintly historical figures, at odds with our high-tech human rights, almost caricatures of themselves. The fact is that Muslims live their religion. We do not."

One danger posed by the uproar over the cartoons, Fisk says, is that it plays into the hands of extremists:

For many Muslims, the "Islamic" reaction to this affair is an embarrassment. There is good reason to believe that Muslims would like to see some element of reform introduced to their religion. If this cartoon had advanced the cause of those who want to debate this issue, no-one would have minded. But it was clearly intended to be provocative. It was so outrageous that it only caused reaction.

Another danger, he says, is that the Western nations led by the United States and Great Britain have already stirred up too much hatred in the Middle East over politics. Adding conflict over religion just makes things more explosive.

... this is not a great time to heat up the old Samuel Huntingdon garbage about a "clash of civilizations". Iran now has a clerical government again. So, to all intents and purposes, does Iraq (which was not supposed to end up with a democratically elected clerical administration, but that's what happens when you topple dictators). In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood won 20 per cent of the seats in the recent parliamentary elections. Now we have Hamas in charge of "Palestine". There's a message here, isn't there? That America's policies - "regime change" in the Middle East - are not achieving their ends. These millions of voters were preferring Islam to the corrupt regimes which we imposed on them.

For the Danish cartoon to be dumped on top of this fire is dangerous.

In any event, it's not about whether the Prophet should be pictured. The Koran does not forbid images of the Prophet even though millions of Muslims do. The problem is that these cartoons portrayed Mohamed as a bin Laden-type image of violence. They portrayed Islam as a violent religion. It is not. Or do we want to make it so?

ENG 111: IslamiCity a portal to Islam

ENG 111 students please note --

Last week in class, you found a website called IslamiCity that contains a lot of basic information on Islam and the people who practice the religion, who are called Muslims. I had time to check it out over the weekend, and I think it's a good portal -- or introduction -- for us to use as we discuss relations between Islam and the largely secular societies of the West.

According to a 2002 article in The Gulf News, an English-language newspaper in the United Arab Emirates, IslamiCity was started in 1995 by Dany Doueiri, a professor of Islamic history at the University of Southern California, and Mohammed Abdul Aleem. Based in Culver City, Calif., it is one of "a myriad of Islamic sites that have emerged lately with the aim of promoting better understanding of Islam and projecting it as a way of life, not just a creed."

Dourai told the Gulf News, "It has no partisan or political affiliations, as it was designed to be a community site ... [t]hat holds the rising voice of moderate Muslims everywhere." The paper noted "mild, tolerant tone of the site" and reported:

Around 50 per cent of the visitors come for the U.S. However, a site with this level of popularity inevitably faces frequent attacks by hackers, although these have all been brought quickly under control.

"Apart from hacking, we also receive hate mail, which we take time to answer in an attempt to change hatred to understanding."

Dr Doueiri contended IslamiCity has, to a great extent, helped remove misconceptions about Islam and promote the inherent Islamic principles of peace, liberty and justice.

IslamiCity carries basic information about Islam and commentary on current events.

'Who speaks for Islam? For the West?'

Since we'll be discussing issues raised by this month's "cartoon wars" in English 111, I hope to post links to several thoughtful articles over the weekend. I spotted them while I was scrambling to keep up with events, and now the uproar appears to be simmering down, I'll be able to catch up. (So, as I used to say when I wrote a newspaper column, watch this space.) In the meantime, the Arab TV station al Jazeera today carried stories on its website quoting Muslim leaders who want to calm the uproar.

Even Khaled Meshaal, leader of the Palestinian resistance group Hamas, which supports armed struggle against Israel, "is prepared to play a role in calming the situation between the Islamic world and Western countries on condition that these countries commit themselves to putting an end to attacks against the feelings of Muslims", according to al Jazeera. The station also quoted Ali al-Samman, who heads an interconfessional dialogue committee at Al-Azhar university in Cairo and is considered the highest authority in Sunni Islam. He said now is a time for "[q]uiet debate and dialogue, without passion."

Al Jazeera also covered Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, who spoke Friday at a two-day international conference on "Who Speaks for Islam? Who Speaks for the West?" He had stern words for the West, but he also spoke for moderate Muslims who have not been rioting in the streets.

"The demonisation of Islam and the vilification of Muslims, there is no denying, is widespread within mainstream Western society," said Abdullah, whose country heads the 57-member Organisation of the Islamic Conference. He said the cartoons only reinforce stereotypes held by Westerners who "think Usama bin Laden speaks for the religion and its followers. Islam and Muslims are linked to all that is negative and backward." He also put the fracas in a political context:

Abdullah said Western nations wanted to control the world's oil and gas, and blamed that desire along with colonialism and "the imposition of Israel upon the Arab world" for a rift with the Muslim faith.

The premier also said Muslims saw the "hegemony" of Western powers "manifested directly in the attack upon Afghanistan and in the occupation of Iraq".

These "have all contributed in one way or another to the huge chasm that has emerged between the West and Islam," he told the gathering of religious leaders and scholars in Kuala Lumpur.

Al Jazeera said the conference in Kuala Lampur, the capital of Malaysia, "will address ways to dispel mutual misperceptions through the media and how policymakers can develop policies to ensure that globalisation benefits Muslims and diffuse Muslim grievances towards the West."

Diplomatic language: 'Go to @#$%!'

With the ruckus over European cartoons insulting the founder of Islam subsiding a little, I went on the internet looking for calm, well-considered commentary on cross-cultural communication. That's what we're really talking about here. I found plenty, almost too much to assimilate. Somehow, a civil conversation has to take place between Muslims and mostly secular people in the West. And those conversations may be beginning, especially in the media. We'll follow them as they develop.

But instead, today I was drawn into a news blog posted Tuesday by Simon Jeffrey of The Guardian, a center-left newspaper in England that is considered one of the best in the world. I'll admit it -- it tempted me down off from the high road. Jeffreys was commenting on Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez' reply, in colorful street language, when British prime minister Tony Blair criticized him in the British House of Commons.

Chavez' idiom was a little hard for the Brits, who learn their Spanish in school and not on the street, to figure out. Said Jeffrey:

When Hugo Chavez told Tony Blair to "vayase largo al cipote" there were a few immediate problems. Where had the Venezuelan leader told the prime minister to go? What was he being asked to stick where?

It is normal in diplomacy for words to assume a level of meaning rather different to that understood by the man in the street. A "full and frank discussion" is, for example, something closer to a flaming row. The difference with Mr Chavez's words is that the closer you are to the Venezuelan street, the more likely you are to understand them.

"Vayase" means go, and "largo" a long way - that much is straightforward. "Cipote" is rather more difficult. ...

I'll paraphrase: Jeffrey said the Spaniards he asked thought it was an anatomical reference, but they couldn't decide which body part it referred to. He continued:

A colleague who spent six years as a reporter in neighbouring Colombia then offered his expertise. He had never encountered the phrase either, but by consulting the extensive online dictionary of the Real Academia Espanola (yes, part of this job does involve looking up rude words in dictionaries), he put it somewhere between "get stuffed" and a rather more vehement expletive ending in "off".

The jibe at Mr Blair - prompted by him telling the Commons that Venezuela should abide by the rules of the international community - seemed to pose similar problems for others trying to report it. The Reuters news agency, whose translation we followed, had Mr Chavez telling the prime minister to "Go right to hell" but "using local slang that is more vulgar". The Spanish version had to translate too, adding the word "diablo" (devil) so readers who did not understand "cipote" would get the pitch of going to hell.

And that's how the international press settled one of the great issues of the day. Tomorrow we'll get back to the efforts to restore civil discourse between secular journalists and Muslims in Europe.

Trib: Media posturing lit cartoon fires

This morning's Chicago Tribune had very good backgrounder on the "Cartoon Wars" by Tom Hundley, a Trib foreign correspondent reporting from London. It's nice to have a morning paper in town that still sends reporters overseas. And it's doubly good to have someone explaining something as complicated and subtle as the row over the Danish cartoons.

Hundley notes the rioting throughout the Muslim world, from the Phillipines to Nigeria, and adds:

... in a bid to up the ante, an Iranian newspaper declared it would test Western notions of free speech by sponsoring a contest for the best cartoon mocking the Holocaust.

It may be a reach to call this a "clash of civilizations," but the international uproar created by the publication of a dozen cartoons in an obscure Danish newspaper does seem to demonstrate that the Muslim world and the West know how to push each other's buttons.

That may turn out to be the most balanced assessment of the whole controversy to date.

In an well-reasoned editorial, the Trib defended the right of the Danish morning paper Jyllands-Posten to publish cartoons satirizing the Prophet Muhammad. But the editorial noted the cartoons were "cheesy" and "about as juvenile as the stunt that produced them." I think that gets it exactly right. The editorial continued:

It's not surprising that Muslims, who believe any artistic rendering of the prophet is blasphemous, were offended. Offending them seems to have been the point of the exercise. The editor of the paper invited cartoonists to submit drawings of Muhammad to challenge what he said was a climate of self-censorship.

Angry Muslims demanded an apology. What they got was a simplistic defense of the right to free expression.

So, suggested the Trib's editorial board, Jyllands-Posten and the other European papers that published the cartoons share the blame for the uproar.

Newspapers across Europe reprinted the cartoons as a sign of solidarity. The German paper Die Welt printed the bomb-in-a-turban drawing on its front page and asserted defiantly that in free societies, "there is a right to blasphemy." The daily France Soir republished the drawings under the headline, "Yes, We Have the Right to Caricature God."

All of this indignant posturing overlooks the fact that nobody's stopping editors from publishing whatever they wish. Freedom of speech, after all, means, freedom from government sanction, not freedom from angry reactions by your readers.

Important point, in my opinion. It looks like Jyllands-Posten is reaping just about exactly what it sowed.

Nor did the Tribune spare the governments involved, either in Europe or the Middle East:

... Petitioned by Muslim groups who wanted the newspapers prosecuted, the [European] governments said they could neither control nor apologize for the actions of a free press.

The governments held to this position even as the flag burnings and boycotts of Danish goods escalated to mass demonstrations and the torching of embassies in Syria and Lebanon. Several Muslim countries recalled their ambassadors from Denmark, as if the Danish government were somehow to blame for the cartoons.

Many Muslims undoubtedly fail to see that distinction because their own governments dictate what is and isn't published. Some of those same governments aren't troubled by content that is offensive to other groups, regularly permitting or even encouraging the publication of anti-Semitic material.

Which, of course, leads up to the Iranian newspaper's offer to sponsor a Holocaust cartoon contest. And so it goes.

Cartoons: Europe at a tipping point?

Today's web edition of The International Herald Tribune, a subsidiary of The New York Times published in Paris, has an unsettling story suggesting the fury over newspaper caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad is "A dangerous moment for Europe and Islam." Alan Cole of the Times reported:

As Islamic protests grew against the publication in Europe of cartoons lampooning the Prophet Muhammad, a small Arab movement active in Belgium, the Netherlands and Denmark responded with a drawing on its Web site of Hitler in bed with Anne Frank. "Write this one in your diary, Anne," Hitler was shown as saying.

The intent of the cartoon, the Arab European League said, was "to use our right to artistic expression" just as the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten did when it published a group of cartoons showing Muhammad last September. "Europe has its sacred cows, even if they're not religious sacred cows," said Dyab Abou Jahjah, the founder of the organization, which claims rights for immigrants aggressively but without violence.

Such contrasts have produced a worrisome sense that the conflict over the cartoons has pushed both sides across an unexpected threshold, where they view each other with miscomprehension and suspicion.

"This feels to me like a defining moment," said Timothy Garton Ash, an Oxford professor of European history. "It is a crunch time for Europe and Islam," he said, "it is an extremely dangerous moment," one that could lead to "a downward spiral of mutual perceptions, and not just between extremists."

Let's hope the controversy hasn't come to that, but Tuesday night there was a growing sense some kind of tipping point may soon be reached. Experts and ordinary citizens interviewed by the Herald Trib were pessimistic:

Ostensibly, said Garton Ash, the clash has pitted two sets of values against one another - freedom of expression and multiculturalism - with the latter demanded of societies in which Muslim immigrant populations, initially seen as a temporary labor force in the 1960s, have become permanent and expanding.

But beyond that, there is a seething resentment among some Muslims that they are treated as second-class citizens and potential terrorists in lands that deny the importance of their faith, even though the number of Muslims in Europe totals 20 million, and possibly many more.

"If you have black hair it is really difficult to find a job," said Muhammad Elzjahim, 22, a construction worker of Palestinian descent whose parents moved to Denmark when he was 2 and who said he studied dental engineering for three and a half years only to find that "it was for nothing because I couldn't find a job in my field."

That mistrust is mirrored by a gnawing sense among some Europeans that their plump welfare states have come to host an unwelcome minority that does not share their values and may even represent a fifth column of potential insurgents, who project themselves as the victims of Islamophobia and discrimination in housing, jobs and social status.

"The radicals don't want an agreement, they don't want the round table," said Rainer Mion, 44, an insurance agent in Berlin. "What they want is to spread their Islamic beliefs all over the world."

Given Europe's history of religious and ethnic conflict, it is all unsettling. Yet sometimes when enough people realize they're a tipping point, they sense the consequences and pull back.

And we can hope the memories evoked by pictures of Anne Frank and Hitler, ironically enough, might have that effect.

"We must de-escalate the situation," said Ayyub Axel Koehler, a converted Muslim who heads the Central Council of Muslims in Germany. "It might be easier to do that in Germany than in other countries. This is an experience we've had in Germany before, so we understand the dangers."

Some links on Danish cartoons, riots

As the worldwide uproar continues over publication in a Danish newspaper of cartoons perceived as derogatory to the Prophet Muhammad, it's all I can do to keep up with it. Too many basic issues and cross-cultural misunderstandings are involved, from the Muslim prohibition on visual representation of the Prophet (similar to but more categorical than the ban on "graven images" in the Ten Commandments) to the basic Western right to freedom of speech. Rather than give my own opinions, I will just post several links to help you get up to speed on the controversy and make up your own minds.

As usual, the BBC News website has just about the most balanced and informative coverage in the world. See especially their Q&A page and a story on "A Clash of Rights and Responsiblities" quoting not only politicians and writers but also Muslim scholars at Oxford and York universities in England. Also worth checking out, and much more balanced than it is given credit for, is al Jazeera, the Arab television station.

Background. The American electronic magazine Slate.com carried a useful summary with a lot of links on Monday. More valuable background comes from Juan Cole of the University of Michigan. Cole is an expert on Shia Islam, and his blog "Informed Comment" has a very dispassionate, factual account of how the controversy simmered along from September till the recent uproar began. Somewhat inflammatory but perceptive (and always provocative) is U.S. conservative pundit Pat Buchanan. His headline, "Europe's Juvenile Idiots Start Religious War," sums up what he's got to say. But Buchanan is always worth reading even when you don't agree with him. But also read the Danish newspaper, Morganavisen Jyllands-Posten (which in English would be "the Jutland Morning Post"), explain why it ran the cartoons before you make up your mind.

The cartoons (and a content advisory). Here are two links. One is to the German newspaper Die Welt ("the World"), which printed a small thumbnail of one of the cartoons Feb. 1 to help explain a story (in German) about why they are offensive. The other link is to the right-wing U.S. opinion magazine Human Events, which carried all the cartoons in a larger format. Since some of the cartoon are clearly offensive, I am providing both links and posting this warning. If you would be offended by the cartoons but want to see what the controversy is about, I believe the smaller version in Die Welt would be less offensive. If you believe any representation of the Prophet Muhammad is blasphemous, you would find the smaller version equally offensive.

'Horse sex' -- Setting record straight

My first blog, almost exactly a month ago, was about last year's top story on The Seattle Post-Intelligencer's website. It was about a man who died after having sex with a horse. Don't ask. I don't know. I don't want to know. (My post ran Jan. 6, and it's in last month's archives if you want to read more about the story.) Tonight, when I was surfing the web to see how the Seahawks were doing in the Super Bowl, I came across an article in Editor & Publisher that sets the record straight. E&P is the trade paper for the newspaper business, and it carried stories on the Post-Intelligencer's coverage.

Turns out E&P's web traffic spiked on the horse sex story, too. It also turns out E&P checked into it, and found it was linked to the Drudge Report, a popular mix of links to news, unverified rumor and right-wing commentary authored by independent journalist Matt Drudge. Said E&P editor Greg Mitchell:

E&P also ran a Web story on the horse incident last summer, focusing, of course, on how the local press handled this seamy story, and it, too, proved to be massively popular. But as with the Seattle Times' No. 1 piece -- and unmentioned in [Post-Intelligencer writer Danny] Westneat's column -- the major reason for the traffic spike was a link on the outrageously popular Drudge Report Web site.

In other words, this was not our core audience -- and in the case of the Seattle paper, not their core audience either. In fact, it wasn't even "local" but national and international. After analyzing Web traffic, we discovered that the E&P story was also picked up on various fetish and humor sites, and this no doubt happened with the Times' story as well.

Commenting in the Dec. 30 issue of E&P, Mitchell managed to take the high road and the low road at the same time:

No doubt the stories gained a tremendous number of local eyeballs beyond Drudge. But editors need to analyze where traffic is coming from before jumping to conclusions on what a core audience really wants. Besides, how many horse sex death cases can you count on?

The moral of the story: Links drive blog traffic.

As if more proof were needed, look at this headline in Mark Morford's Jan. 25 column in SFGate.com, The San Francisco Chronicle's website: "Horse Sex Porn Candy Teens!
Inside! Fresh Google search terms to confound Dubya and the FBI. Also: Is Bush a fascist?" The headline says it all.

One last shot of, uh, at Million Pieces

Before we go any farther, I want everybody to know I can stop writing about James Frey and his, uh, shall we say fictional memoir A Million Little Pieces any time I want to. I've only had a couple ... of blogs, that is ... and it's not a problem. And, like I said, I can quit any time I want to.

But this morning's Chicago Tribune carried a batch of letters in response to a Jan. 30 column by cultural critic Julia Keller. She loved Frey's book, but the letters were all over the map. "Good writing is good writing, no matter what it's called," said an English teacher at Winnetka's New Trier High School. Another, perhaps a snowbird in the Florida keys, said, "He should have published his book as fiction!" Another reader, from suburban Highland Park, said, "Besides being an A-plus writer, James is helping recovering addicts and their families. The good that James is doing with his book far outweighs the lies." But another reader, from Downers Grove, said, "A recovery 'story' based in dishonesty is not helpful to those wishing to recover."

By the time I got finished with all the letters, I decided I'd have one final little Million Little Pieces blog for the road.

The stakes here are higher than what genre category to assign to a controversial book. Addiction is a life-threatening disease, and Frey's story doesn't look like anything that would help most addicts and their families. Instead, it looks like an almost certain invitation to relapse.

Heather King, author of a memoir called Parched, explained both the real-world and literary stakes in a Jan. 17 column for PW Daily, an online publication of Publishers Weekly magazine:

"A ballsy, bone-deep memoir," Salon.com called it, but for any alcoholic worth his or her salt, throwing up blood, puking on oneself, and committing petty-ass crimes in and of themselves couldn't be bigger yawns. What's gritty is the moment, knowing you're dying, when the world turns on its axis and you realize My way doesn't work. What's ballsy isn't just egomaniacally recounting your misdeeds; it's taking the trouble to find the people you've screwed over, looking them in the eye, and saying you're sorry. What's bone-deep -- or might have been if Frey had done it -- is figuring out that other people suffer, too, and developing some compassion for them. [...] Sobriety, in my experience, isn't the staged melodrama of sitting in a bar and staring down a drink to prove you've "won" -- as Frey does upon leaving rehab. It's the ongoing attempt, knowing in advance you'll fall woefully short, to order your life around honesty, integrity, faith.

So, in fact, is writing. It's every writer's sacred honor to "get it right," but perhaps the burden falls heaviest on the memoirist...

I'll leave the genre questions to the literary critics, but I believe recovery demands rigorous honesty and the support of others. Instead, Frey offers what King calls "testosterone-fueled rage" and "studly ire." Bluster and swagger, I'd say.

That doesn't mean Frey's writing may not have literary merit. Who am I to argue with Julia Keller? She's been taking a 400-level lit class at DePaul this semester, and I've been enjoying the way she engages with 18th-century Irish satirist Jonathan Swift. (I was fascinated with Dean Swift, too, and I love the way she captures his complexity with a few deft strokes in a daily newspaper.) So in the end, the literary questions come down to a matter of taste. Hemingway could be a little high on testosterone, too, come to think of it, and he wasn't a bad writer.

But when I see people writing letters to the editor about how Frey's bluster, swagger and testosterone can help other addicts, the literary taste I get is the taste of ashes.

What's a feature story? Here's what ...

We've been trying to define feature stories in a couple of my classes, and we've been having a hard time. Is it "human interest?" Is it a "bright?" A page brightener, in other words? A descriptive essay? A narrative? A profile? All of above? None of above? I've never been able to pin it down, and I've never seen a definition in a book I liked yet.

But now comes the perfect feature story, at least to my way of thinking. It appeared Monday under the headline "Bat or badger? It's the roadkill recipe book," and it's by staff writer Steven Morris of The Guardian, a respected British newspaper. I think it's well written enough to be studied in college. So COM 209 (basic newswriting) and ENG 111 (freshman English) students, please take note.

Look at the lede. It depends on word choice, imagery and detail just as much as any Shakespeare sonnet:

For most, a squashed hedgehog or flattened badger lying on the side of the road is a tragic sight - for Arthur Boyt it is an opportunity for a free, tasty and nutritious meal. Mr Boyt has spent the last 50 years scraping carcasses from the side of the road and chucking them, together with a few herbs and spices, into his cooking pot.

The retired civil servant has sampled the delights of weasel, rat and cat. His most unusual meal was a greater horseshoe bat, which he reckons is not dissimilar in taste to grey squirrel, if the comparison helps. Fox tends to repeat on him. He has tucked into labrador, nibbled at otter and could not resist trying porcupine when he came across a spiky corpse while on holiday in Canada.

Yesterday Mr Boyt (favourite snack: badger sandwich) announced he is ready to share the secrets of his curious culinary success with a wider audience and is writing a roadkill recipe book.

The English teacher in me soars with joy when I savor the alliteration, rhyme and measured cadence of weasel, rat, cat and greater horsewhoe bat in the second graf. This is not your average police beat or county board story!

But it follows a standard newspaper format: (1) an attention-getter in the lede, in this case the descriptions of roadkill but more often an anecdote or story; (2) a "nut graf" in the third graf that tells what the news is, that he's coming out with the book; (3) the body of the story, which strings together lively quotes separated by a graf or two of paraphrase; and (4) a "kicker" that zings you at the end, in this case the last quote about eating a labrador retriever.

Look at how many quotes Morris uses, and how, er, flavorful the language is. "It's good meat for free and I know nobody has been messing with it and feeding it with hormones. By writing a book I hope to show people it's perfectly normal and healthy to eat." And, after a graf of narrative and transition, "If the animal has been dead a while and has gone green the taste is a bit bland, but if you cook them thoroughly, you can still eat it. I've been doing it all my life and never been ill once."

There is one big difference I'd insist on. Morris "buries" quotes. That is, he puts them at the end of a graf. In U.S. newswriting, we don't. We emphasize a quote by starting the graf with it. Often with a one-sentence graf. So I'd write that last graf as two, with attribution added (I've underlined it here to show I've changed the quote, but wouldn't in a newspaper). Like this:

Mr Boyt has no regrets about eating the labrador, which he emphasises was without a collar when he found it.

"There was nothing on it to show who its owner was even though it was in good condition, so I took it home and ate it," he said. "It was just like a nice piece of lamb."

Two students in COM 150 (intro to mass com) were struck by the story, too, when I posted a link to our message. board. One said, "Yummy!!! LOL." The other just answered the question in the headline. "Bat," she said. She didn't explain, and I didn't ask.

The @#$%! liberal media

Several weeks ago I got an e-mail message with "Pictures From Iraq That Are Too Shocking & Graphic for The Mainstream Media." They showed American soldiers with Iraqi children, soldiers linking arms in a prayer circle, Iraqis holding up signs saying "Iraqi people happy today," "thank you thank you U.S.A." and "Thank You Very Much Mr. Bush," and a heavily armed soldier leaning down to pet a kitten. Below the pictures, the message asked, shouted in all-caps, rather, "PLEASE KEEP THIS GOING EVEN IF YOU HAVE PASSED IT ON BEFORE."

It is, of course, a variation on the age-old tactic of reviling the people who report the news instead of the people who make the news when the news isn't good. In slightly different versions, it's been passed around on right-wing websites for two years now. I Googled the keywords and found the pictures here and here, among other places ... but also a personal blog that amended the heading to read "Photos That will NEVER Make the News, unless they were released by major news organizations in the first place." The blogger had a point. Of 10 or 12 pictures, two carried credit lines from The Associated Press, one from Reuters and one from Agence France Presse.

Here's the point: Who ran the pictures the news media don't want us to see? Why, the news media, that's who.

I was reminded of the now-we-see-them-now-we-don't pictures when ABC News anchor Bob Woodward and his camera operator were injured over the weekend by a roadside bomb blast in Iraq. As Slate.com noted, even conservative bloggers, who normally attack the MSM for what they see as a liberal bias, noticed they were in country on a "good news" story. New York Times TV critic Allesandra Stanley explains that angle, which wasn't developed in most accounts I've seen:

Bob Woodruff was in Baghdad for ABC reporting the good news that the Bush administration complains is ignored by the news media, and he ended up as a glaring illustration of the bad news.

Mr. Woodruff, the newly named co-anchor of "World News Tonight," spent Friday chatting with friendly Iraqis on the street and slurped ice cream at a popular Baghdad shop to show how some in Iraq are seeking a semblance of normalcy.

Yesterday he and an ABC cameraman, Doug Vogt, were badly wounded while traveling in a routine convoy with Iraqi military forces who are being trained to impose that normalcy and allow American troops to go home.

What happened to Mr. Woodruff and Mr. Vogt was one of those chilling television moments that mark a milestone. This conflict has shown all too clearly that soldiers, civilians, aid workers and journalists are all targets.

But apparently this accolade from the dreaded, elitist New York Times was too much. Cori Dauber, a mass communications scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, went right back to blasting away at the TV networks and the dreaded Times. In her blog Rantingprofs.com, Dauber writes:

Every other aspect, element, item, or fact about the country [Iraq] -- including the political situation -- has just gone away. It's been all roadside bombs all the time.

The irony, of course, is that the story the ABC crew was originally sent out to cover -- the quality and progress of Iraqi troops -- was the first story to fall by the wayside. What has been covered in the interim was the risk of roadside bombs and the quality of military medical care, and that's about it. The only thing that's been said about Iraqi troops is that the ABC crew was with them because that's "the" story to cover. After which they once again disappeared from the scene. [Emphasis in the original.]

It looks like, if nothing else, the right-wing blogosphere is back on message.

LATER: To test Dauber's hypothesis the mainstream media coverage of Iraq is "all roadside bombs all the time," I searched the Google news page for all stories mentioning the keyword "Iraq" between Jan. 29, when the ABC newsmen were hit by the bomb, and Jan. 31. I got 38,800 hits. Then I did an advanced search on keywords "Iraq" and "roadside bombs." I got 229, or 0.59 percent of the total. That seemed low, so I searched again for keywords "Iraq" and "Bob Woodruff," and got 2,790 hits. I think that figure demonstrates Dauber's point that the ABC anchor is being covered like a celebrity, but it comes out to 7.19 percent of the total stories on Iraq. If my math is correct, she still overstates the ratio by a little more than 90 percent.