Reporter's Abduction Reinforces Risks In Covering Iraq

One of the most oft-heard complaints we've heard about the media these past months is that there is a lack of positive news about the state of affairs in Iraq. While suicide bombings and U.S. military casualties are reported, we don't hear about all the good happening, the critics say. In the fall, we looked at the reasons we don't hear more good news and heard some varying opinions. But this week's abduction of Christian Science Monitor stringer Jill Carroll underscores what CBS London producer and sometime Baghdad bureau chief Randall Joyce told us in September -- that Iraq was a dangerous place for journalists. "We didn't come to that conclusion frivolously. We did it because people were getting killed, and getting kidnapped. We are, unfortunately, experts at calibrating risk, and this is a place that is extremely dangerous," Joyce told PE.

Today's papers offer a good roundup of Carroll's abduction, the efforts to find out who has taken her and the media's joint cooperation to withhold the details of the story for the first several days.

According to The Washington Post account, Carroll may have been one journalist who felt rather comfortable in Iraq:

"Unlike most Western reporters in Baghdad, Carroll spoke Arabic well enough to easily talk to ordinary Iraqi people and interview Iraqi officials. She had picked up the language while working as a business reporter in Jordan and, in the days before her abduction, had renewed a plea to her Iraqi interpreter and driver to speak only Arabic to her as they traveled so she could improve her fluency, colleagues said.

In a scholarship application filled out shortly before Saturday's kidnapping, Carroll outlined proposals for reporting projects in Iraq. In them, she showed a keen understanding of the country.

She wanted to spend six months of the fellowship making her Arabic better still, she wrote in the application. 'In this poorly understood region, where so much is at stake, important stories are lost everyday because the foreign press corps doesn't speak Arabic,' Carroll wrote. 'Journalism is a public service and readers are best-served if I and the people I am writing about speak the same language.'"