Story idea: searching for disappeared journalists

From a story in the New York Times [permalink] about a foursome of NYT journalists who disappeared for a few days during the recent fighting in Libya:

[After two days of being taken from place to place by Libyan soldiers,] [t]hey landed on Thursday in Tripoli, where they were handed over to Libyan defense officials. They were transferred to a safe house, where they said they were treated well. They were each allowed a brief phone call. That was the first time since their capture two and a half days earlier that their whereabouts became known to their families and colleagues at The Times.

Their disappearance had kicked off an intensive search effort. The Times canvassed hospitals and morgues, beginning a grim process-of-elimination search. The paper also turned to a variety of people on the ground who might have heard or seen something -- local residents, security contractors for Western businesses, workers for nongovernmental organizations. It also notified American diplomats.

The State Department got word Thursday afternoon that the journalists were safe and unharmed, in a phone call to Jeffrey D. Feltman, the assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs ...

I'm interested in that middle paragraph -- the futile search. I wonder whose job that was, in the middle of a war, when they probably wanted all the stringers they could find to cover the fighting in various towns and cities, some people get a call that they're wanted, not for reporting, but to make the rounds of hospitals, jails and morgues, looking for a gaggle of American reporters. That would make a terrific premise for a surrealist novel, right down to the denouement in which, after a nightmarish journey across the war-torn landscape, the protagonist finds out that the journalists have been found safe, no thanks to him, in fact their whereabouts have been known for at least ten or twelve of the last harrowing hours that the protagonist has been risking his life to find news of them. Loads of irony along the way.

All you need to know about the early 21st Century bourgeoisie

There's a piece on the Bay Citizen website this morning, Meet Your (Sustainable) Chocolate Farmers. The author, Tara Duggan, opens with this unappetizing lede:

When I hear that chocolate is produced in an unethical manner, I'd rather swallow knives than hear reasons why I shouldn't enjoy one of my favorite foods. But with Valentine's Day approaching, I thought it was time to face up to the labor issues around cocoa farming.

If I may unpack that:

1. She occasionally hears that one of her favorite foods, chocolate, is sometimes "produced in an unethical manner."
2. In order to keep from hearing this discouraging news, she'd "rather swallow knives."
   
   Actually it seems strange that to keep from hearing something one would swallow knives; it would be more logical to stick those knives into one's ears. But I guess that if one swallowed them, the discomfort might be so distracting that one couldn't pay attention to bad news about candy. Anyway:
    
   
3. Valentine's Day is approaching, and as a journalist, she's hard put to come up with a piece linked to the holiday.
4. What better time to face her fears about the conditions under which chocolate is produced?

Here we have the ingredients of the perfect Bay Area foodie post: transgressiveness (chocolate is bad for you), trendiness (chocolate is looked upon by foodies as a gourmet item, at least potentially), liberal guilt, and pop psychology (let's face our fears!). That the fears in question have not to do with facing the rubber truncheons of the Egyptian secret police, or the dank cells of Chinese prisons, or even the comparatively comfortable but difficult decision to, say, put your mother in a "care facility," doesn't make them easier to bear. They are fears nonetheless.

Right, then. How wonderful that the writer is able to assuage her consternation by discovering a free trade grower's cooperative in Ghana, owned and operated by colorfully dressed women (a close examination of the picture reveals they are wearing dresses imprinted with the logo of their co-op). And what's more, they are not wasting their profits on skin-lightening cream or anything Westerners might disapprove of; they are practicing democratic socialism at its finest:

Their fair trade agreement allows them extra money to create additional income generation projects for the villages, such as making soap.

Soap for the villages! It's a win-win for everyone.

As for the internal conflict of eating candy, that's taken care of by the fact that it's a holiday anyway. On Valentine's Day you may eat chocolate, while reading the inevitable newspaper and magazine features that assure you it's good for you in small quantities. And at the prices we pay for gourmet chocolate, small quantities are all we can afford anyway.

Now don't you feel bad about eating those M&Ms in the break room? For shame.

The interview and the interviewer

On Salon.com, Laura Fraser looks at the sometimes troublesome relationship between novelists and interviewers. This caused me to recall the James Thurber story "The Interview," in which a newspaperman (as journalists were called in the mid-20th century) visits a famous writer, who leads him by the nose up a number of conversational blind alleys before getting almost too drunk to talk. Thurber treats all the characters with characteristic compassion and understanding, and even better, has the reporter do the same with the novelist, despite how the novelist treats him. (The story, published in the Feb. 25, 1950 New Yorker, is reprinted in the collection "Thurber Country.")

The whole topic reminded me of some of the early interviews I tried to conduct as a student journalist at the Daily Texan in Austin during the mid 1970s. The first was when I was assigned to go backstage at a concert venue, the legendary Armadillo World Headquarters, to interview a touring rock guitarist. Unfortunately I was utterly unfamiliar with the work of this very famous blues-influenced player and I knew I would have absolutely nothing to ask. To my utter relief, I was turned away at the backstage door: I wasn't on the list. I wrote up the experience in a kind of New Journalism way, putting myself in the article and writing mainly about my anxiety about the whole situation. I wish I still had that clipping.

The second was a couple of years later when, still a student, I interviewed David Bromberg, another rock musician; he isn't remembered much today but he was in the same crowd as Ry Cooder, Jerry Jeff Walker, and Townes Van Zandt. Unlike the first attempt, I was very familiar with the work of David Bromberg and I was looking forward to talking with him. But when I got backstage, I utterly froze. Absolutely tongue-tied, I could not think of a single goddamn thing to ask. It was a complete fiasco, but he was actually very polite about it, and I wrote it all up as nicely as I could. But to tell you the truth, the first piece was better.

Since then, I've interviewed several people, including the novelist Yiyun Li -- I interviewed her by Google Chat, which is a great way to interview people, because you don't have to transcribe the result -- and io9.com founding editor Annalee Newitz. I interviewed filmmaker George Romero. I even learned how to interview people whose work I didn't really know or understand, by becoming an ISO 9000 auditor at the software company I worked at in the 1990s. Basically this meant that I, who knew almost nothing about software, went around interviewing people who did. This was a good job for someone who, like me, is very good at pretending that the 1% they do know is sufficient for about 50% of the work. And I've been happily out of my depth ever since.

All news, all evening

A piece in the New Yorker wonders why CNN's ratings in evening prime time aren't so hot. I had to stop and think: Why the hell would people watch news and commentary all evening long -- isn't the evening a time to relax and be entertained?

And then I realized -- it's because prime time network programming, the dramas, comedies and variety which people have watched for the last fifty years, is so bad that cable TV news and commentary is entertainment. And Fox and, to a lesser extent, MSNBC, are eating CNN's lunch simply because they're more entertaining. Some dipshit shooting his mouth off is more entertaining than serious reporting, and that's why we have Fox and MSNBC, not to mention talk radio's domination of the medium, at all.

The movie Network, with what seemed in 1976 like an over-the-top prediction of news as entertainment, becomes more prescient every year. Most people simply remember it for the slogan "I'm mad as hell..." but what it was really about was the degradation of network news into entertainment. This post on the website of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting compares the film's Howard Beale, "a fictional TV host famous for undergoing an on-air emotional disintegration," with Fox's Glenn Beck.

Today's fake: Italian journo fabricated interviews with famous writers

Via Galleycat: An Italian journalist called Tommaso Debenedetti may have fabricated interviews with Philip Roth and John Grisham. The fake interviews were published in Italian newspapers.

technorati: fakes, fraud, writers

On the other hand, 'Holy shit, they're shooting at us' pretty much covers it

140 characters is a novel when you're being shot at.
 

-- Oft-retweeted message on the #iranelection Twitter stream, presumably in answer to the objections
that posts on Twitter can't offer much in the way of detailed news

Today's fake: Ersatz reporter/Catholic "priestess" carried from press area

A woman who said she was a reporter for an obscure Georgia monthly newspaper, and who was wearing a cassock and also identified herself as a Roman Catholic "preistess," was carried out bodily by Secret Service agents from a press corral yesterday as President Obama was about to arrive at LAX to depart for Washington on Air Force One. The woman wanted to give Obama a letter asking him to "take a stand for traditional marriage," she said. The Secret Service asked her to leave when she refused to give the letter to an Obama staffer, and when she refused to leave, they carried her out. (Courtesy MediaBistro's Daily Media News email.

A dick to the end, Bush snubs Helen Thomas

Buried in this masturbatory CNN piece about Bush's final press conference, in which the network's White House reporter spends several minutes discussing whether or not the president purposely mispronounces her name, is the note that in his candid farewell to the press, Bush snubbed 88-year-old Helen Thomas, who has covered nine presidents and is regarded as the dean of the White House press corps.

technorati: Bush, journalists, Helen Thomas

Headline of the month

I saw this on Salon.com in their "From the Wires" section of news reports. I didn't click on it -- the headline itself is too sublime and my mental image of what the story is actually about cannot be improved by mere facts. Behold:

Accused says he was just milking goat