Posted on 01/29/2006 8:39:09 PM PST by Lorianne
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 injured 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.
Soldiers, American and Iraqi, are wounded and killed by roadside bombs and ambushes every day in tragedies so common they float to the back pages. But until now, at least, network anchors always seemed to sail through hot spots with an inalienable aura of invulnerability, like senators or movie stars.
Mr. Woodruff's plight underscored at a whole new level that Americans there feel like sitting ducks, picked off by a faceless enemy.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
And Michael Kelly.
This Alessandra dope has the lame job of being a TV critic...and she can't even do that right...
"The Alessandra Watch: How Wrong Is She?
READ MORE: alessandra stanley, corrections, new york times, top
20051227nytcorrex.jpgThat little bout of truthiness bitchiness this morning reminded us that itd be a good time to look back at Times TV critic Alessandra Stanleys correctability in 2005. Our good pal Nexis tells us that Stanley notched 20 corrections on 137 articles this year, which means that a full 15 percent of her dispatches required correcting.*
But then we wondered if perhaps we were being unfair. (After all, why must we always be so glass-half-full? Congratulations, Alessandra, on being right a whopping 85 percent of the time this year!) Is Stanley really so much worse than any other critic?
The answer: Yes! She is! We checked 2005 corrections rates on 19 Times cultural critics, and we discovered that Stanley can comfortably claim the title as Most Inaccurate 2005. Indeed, shes more than twice as inaccurate as the average non-Stanley critic at the Times. (The other 18 averaged a 7 percent correction rate.)"
http://www.gawker.com/news/new-york-times/the-alessandra-watch-how-wrong-is-she-145318.php
I would not be at all surprised if Woodruff appears on the State of the Union preview show. There's more than one kind of martyr in this war.
That said, I do wish them a speedy recovery.
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