Answers Without Questions about "News-Approach"

Do you think there's maybe a link or three missing here, Mr. Bones?

Reidar Visser said [to Mr. Badger] I am glad you put that sensationalist NYT headline about Sistani in context. These “advisers” and “aides” of Sistani are just rank and file members of his bureaucracy – many of them may have closer ties to the political parties than to Sistani himself – but journalists like to call them “key advisors” whenever they manage to land an interview with them. They contradict each other all the time; the important thing to look for when it comes to Sistani is not the rumours but the fatwas and pronouncement which he actually issues via his office. Also thanks for great coverage of the national reconciliation process (or the lack thereof). It is a sad fact of this “process” that the media makes much of even the paltriest of steps forward, while less attention is accorded to the measures that could have brought some real rapprochement. Hence, we hear a lot about “meetings”, “contacts”, “conferences” and bills that are on their way through the governmental machinery. What really counts, however, is actual introduction of bills into parliament for adoption, and, of course, progress on the constitutional revision track.

"Sensationalist NYT headline"?

At the NYTC the management must be deliberately aiming at a dull exterior finish, at making the printable news seem more like school than like recess. Therefore, no sensational headlines, and no comic strips either. I'm still a little shocked that they should condescend to admit coloured photographs, myself, Mr. Bones.

Dr. Visser's threshold of sensationalisation is likely to be lower than our own, but Norway must be even more so than we think of it as, if our poor old Aunt Nitsy can really look like a yellow journalist tart to him.

Recall that you and I felt a slight jolt at the original (reportedly mistaken) report ourselves. We did not guess that the report was mistaken, of course, we only thought it a bit out of line with our own conception of M. al-Sístání's line. An easy jolt to get over it was, with a little reflection on our part that perhaps Mercy and Justice are not on quite the same terms at Najaf as here in the former Christojudaeandom. Our notions are that "leading clerics" probably ought to err in favour of Mercy, that it is somehow vaguely indecorous or unbecoming for them to insist upon strict Justice. Clearly all that was but a mote in our own eye, and nothing at all to do with M. al-Sístání! Five seconds' reflection revealed as much, and then we devoted perhaps another five seconds to remembering all the crimes of the Ba‘th against the Twelvers in general, and against the Najaf Hawza in particular, all the deluge of causes that might make even a "quietist" "cleric" hesitate to be quite as forgiving and forgetting as we aliens busybodies might prefer other folks' quietist clerics to be. Ten seconds thought in all, then, Mr. Bones, and that was that. We had accommodated the slight jolt.

And now it seems we must unaccommodate it. But that's easy enough, we have only to say "Ahmad Chalabí" and hey, presto! suddenly we know where we REALLY are. Those nice old gentlemen with their beards and their turbans and their scarcely comprehensible disputations about _istishab_ and whatnot are much as we would wish them to be, and the real snake in the grass is not merely of a known species, the neo-conman, but individually and by name only too familiar to us. Indeed, one might even score this round "Najaf 1, Crawford 0," since the principal nice old gentleman seem to be a good deal less vulnerable to Chalabí snow jobs than mediocre middle-aged Yalies are.

So we think in Massachusetts, Mr. Bones, but in Norway Dr. Visser thinks otherwise. He was sensationalised by report of the spectre of a Stern Unforgiving Sistani, it looks like, and now that it is reported that there exists no such hobgoblin, he, too, will have to reconsider his mental accommodations. There should be a soft landing for him as well, unless I misunderstand his very peculiar vicarious partisanship altogether -- as possibly I may.

But it is Mr. Badger's alleged contextualization that interests me most:

Certainly the lies in and of themselves are important, but equally important is the news-approach that eliminates local background, making people tend to accept cartoon-like lack of background as something perfectly normal.

Ah well, if its only to be a matter of "news-approaches," then! De gustibus non disputandum, and we still remain free, Mr. Bones, to skip over all those local-background heaps of anecdotal evidence that various persons keep heaping up for various purposes, a few of those purposes possibly innocent.

Look at Mr. Badger's own practise, Mr. Bones! Does he anthologise for us ignoramuses random subject-on-the-street interviews after the fashion of Anthony Shadid or Nir Rosen, for instance? Not at all. What he really likes best in the invasionized neo-Levant is the mind-bending coffee-house intellectual and ineffectual stuff. And so do we, and that's why we read him and get bored much sooner with journalism-schooled Shadids and Rosens who try to write "vivid" stories with "impact" about the GOP's colonies on the same lines as they would scribble such stories about the GOP Heimatland itself.

They labour in vain, it seems to me, all these vivid-impact purveyors, no matter whether they try to spark up al-Fallúja IQ or only Philadelphia PA.

How then, Mr. Bones? What sort of "news-approach" should WE aim to impose, then?

Astaghfirulláh KECEKE.