by Jerome du Bois
Recently my wife pointed out to me, "Did you know that a lot of your writing is about standing for the dead, or with them?" I hadn't realized that, but it's probably true.
That's not what I want to be doing now, but as we approach noon in Phoenix, nobody knows the fate of kidnapped Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena, 56 --and nobody's talking about it on the blogosphere, far as I can tell.
I'm as eager as anyone to nail Eason Jordan's sorry hide to the CNN wall with five million hypertext arrows (see LaShawn Barber for ammo), and make CNN, in Hugh Hewitt's fine phrase, "The Most Busted Name In News," but this is news, too, people --in fact, isn't this the very story, except for nationality, that Eason Jordan ran on about: targeted journalists?
Well, here's one: Giuliana Sgrena. (The latest Google News, eight hours old and of dubious provenance, reports her murder. It better be false.)
And here's two more: French journalist Florence Aubenas and her interpreter, Hussein Hanoun Al-Saadi.
According to Reporters Without Borders, "46 journalists and media assistants have been killed since the start of fighting in Iraq in March 2003."
The reader can find the list here.
By the way, Giuliana Sgrena is pretty much relegated to the crawl on the cable channels, if she's mentioned at all. . .
It just hit me: the blogosphere is lucky that Oriana Fallaci is too sick to blog, because if she got a hold on this story --well, to paraphrase Lt.Col Frank Slade, she'd take a flamethrower to this place!
Big as the Eason Jordan story is, he's not facing death right now, is he?
There I go with the death thing again. Well, there it is. And it's probably strange that I'm guided by the words of two fictional detectives. Heironymus Bosch, LA Police, said, "Everybody counts or nobody counts." And NY Detective William Somerset, in Se7en, said, "So many corpses roll away unrevenged."
The reader might also be interested in my first take on the Eason Jordan Fables story, The President Has A Question For CNN's John King.
[Update 2/9: Yes, I know Sgrena is an anti-American communist who has sympathy for "the resistance." This may be a kidnapping-insurance scam. All possible. So? All the more reason to broadcast it. And what about the other two?]
Posted by Jerome at February 8, 2005 12:12 PM | TrackBack"Kidnapping-insurance scam"? Are you retarded?
Posted by: Johnny Mainstream at March 5, 2005 07:07 AMMr. Mainstream, it embarrasses me to even write your silly pseudonym.
Kidnapping-insurance scams happen all over the world.
Asking me if I'm retarded is an admission you have no reason in your head.
And you're about a month late to the party, aren't you? What retarded you, I wonder? Don't bother answering.
JdB
Posted by: Jerome du Bois at March 5, 2005 08:32 AM