FOUND IN FALLUJAH . . . Run quick, Chicagoans, and get yr Trib with its p-1 James Janega latest from Fallujah, where Marines found torture chambers and terrorist banners and more.

(It’s P-1 in hard copy, with jump to last pg of first section, story of the day, paired with Liz Sly’s out of Baghdad, an overview about coming elections, but it’s hard to find on the Trib’s web site, whose p-1 has the black-victim picture Trib editors love to run, going with YESTERDAY’S p-1 hard cover story with frightening, not to say scare, headline, “Poor live housing nightmare while investors reap benefits.” Wait, Chi Trib site caught up to its hard copy sometime after 6:30, when it still had yesterday’s stories. Something wrong here: is this a Toonerville Trolley of a news operation, or isn’t it?)

Janega’s “Blood, knives, cage hint at atrocities: Tip leads U.S. to alleged al-Zarqawi house of torture” – a much more matter-of-fact announcement than yesterday’s – is his usual telling what he sees and hears. It closes with what’s written on the wall of a “dungeon-like room, pitch-black” except for Marines’ flashlights next to “a bloody fingerprint” – in English and Arabic the cryptic words:

“Put . . . ”
“Kept . . . ”
“Plan . . . ”
” . . . to pass on”

– all in English and Arabic – and beside them one more word, “written only in giant Arabic loops:
“’Hope.’”

Janega also tells of:
* “a steel bar bolted into the bathroom wall,” from which “a chain dangled,”
* “a cage tucked into a corner, cobbled together from rusted bits of wire, chicken coops, broken crates and twist ties . . . tall enough for a person to stand in,”
* “a disassembled hand grenade, rubber gloves and numerous bottles of chemicals,” including potassium cyanide identified by a translator, who “at that point Sunday afternoon . . . was the only one who could talk.”

PROBLEMS, PROBLEMS: “Most agree on this: The United States has an image problem,” says Sun-Times’s Lynn Sweet in today’s column over-ambitiously entitled, “What in the world awaits Condi?” as in Condoleezza Rice, our new sec. of state. Muslims and Canadians do not approve of our war in Iraq, for instance. Golly.

The goal is “to advance U.S. interests and security and to provide the moral basis for U.S. leadership in the world” by “public” diplomacy, says Sweet. An undersecretary’s position, currently empty, would normally handle this.

“There is a sense of urgency,” she says, felt by whom she does not say. She discusses this “public” diplomacy in spin-control terms: counter the lie right away, nip lies in buds.

But then she notes that the “regarded” Colin Powell, apparently meaning well-regarded, did not travel enough and so neglected “personal” diplomacy, staying home to protect his Rumsfeld-threatened turf. But Rice’s turf is not threatened. So:

“Rice should start traveling.

“A lot.”

(Paragraph structure in original.)

The unfilled-undersecretary-post problem is left behind.

Definitely.

Then (no transition) we are told about Congr. Henry Hyde, who “wrote . . . public diplomacy-related provisions in” (into?) a bill intended to reform our intelligence operation.

What’s more, we have not enough translators. This problem is “massive,” in case you thought the lack of both public and private diplomacy was big.

Wait. “Back on [to?] public diplomacy.” Period.

(Sweet’s mother was scared by a telegraph operator, as boys in the 40s gibed about an untoward penchant: the penchant-holder’s mother had a nasty fright during pregnancy, leaving the holder with said penchant. If a kid repeated himself, his mother had been scared by a broken phonograph needle. Not brilliant but serviceable on the playground.)

Then Sweet speaks of a “Broadcasting Board of Governors” and its “startups” since Sept. 11, 2001.

“But public diplomacy is more than just good PR,” she writes, meaning radio programs – the “startups” just mentioned. Then she names more things to do, including “grants to developing nations to develop its [their?] own free press, putting content on the Internet and increasing money into [italics added] Arabic and Chinese language training. It’s the whole message.”

I’ll say. But excuse me. I have to go increase some money into the parking meter. They are nasty about that stuff in Oak Park, demonstrating no diplomacy whatever.

Can’t imagine who’s doing a better job in Fallujah than Chi Trib’s James Janega, here with another day in the city that became a battlefield. He eyeballed the aftermath in houses, spotting family pictures and sandbags (used by insurgents), dusty Koran and English-speaking textbook, prayer rug and teacups, a can of men’s black hair color with “Happy Days Again” written on it in English.

In one such house, he writes, an insurgent waited in the dark and when a five-man U.S. squad opened the door, rolled a grenade toward them that killed one and wounded four. Claim cards are left in each house so that the owners can eventually be compensated by us.

EMBEDDED . . . Chi Trib’s James Janega showed up for work again in Fallujah, hanging out with GIs including Sgt. Marc Veen, 24, of Chicago, watching him at his rooftop post plugging an enemy sniper. “He would have gotten one of my buddies,” Veen told him.

He was with them as they rested or slept. One marked a grenade he meant to launch later. “This is 4 my buddy,” he inscribed. His buddy had been killed the previous day. “It hurts,” said the sergeant, from Norristown, Pa., who’d been at it for three days. “I can’t really think about it because I have to look out for my guys.”

“Grief he pushed off,” wrote Janega. “Rage he kept.”

The dead buddy’s wife (now widow) “lives across the street from my wife,” the Pa. sergeant said softly. “I’m all about fighting.”

Later the chaplain, preaching in a ruined kitchen, quoted St. Paul: “I can do all things through Christ, who strengthens me.” He spoke “with his right hand raised and eyes clenched shut, ignoring muffled blasts from the street.”

“We pray to the heavenly father for our wives, our children, our parents. . . ” he said. “Give us victory, victory, victory.”

=======
A few weeks ago, in Chicago, Janega was reporting on what Judge Anne Burke told Loyola U. audiences about clergy abuse and bishops. I noticed a change in the electronic version, with the notation that a mistake had been corrected and thought, that’s 21st-century journalism: mistakes can be corrected.

I emailed Janega to that effect, and he got back, full of apology for making the mistake in the first place. He surprised me with that. Reporters err; it was correcting the error that had struck me. The guy is conscientious, as is clear from this battlefield reportage.

Chi Trib’s James Janega rode a tank to work. If Sun-Times man Tom Fitzpatrick got a Pulitzer for on-spot reporting for his deadline piece on Weatherman rioting in Chicago in the 70s, what about the guy who tells us what the tank gunner says — “Wow. We’re the only ones left here” — when word comes of enemy success up ahead in the mean streats of Fallujah?

Copy editing Chi Trib (somebody has to do it):

Consider this of 11/12/04, “Experts see states as force in fighting global warming,” in which Stevenson Swanson and his editors can’t decide if he’s talking about warming or states or Bush, who won’t sign the Kyoto treaty.

NEW YORK — [Delete: With the re-election of President Bush, state governments and big business will likely be the biggest forces pushing policies and developing innovative technologies aimed at reducing U.S. emissions of the gases scientists say are causing global warming.]

[Delete: That forecast by leaders in the environmental and business communities is based on the Bush administration’s opposition to the Kyoto Protocol, the international agreement that seeks to cut the amount of so-called greenhouse gases that enter the atmosphere, where they trap heat.]

The nation’s environmental and business leadership is unanimous in its opinion that what Bush won’t do about global warming, someone else will have to do, namely the states and big business. [If not unanimous, then what? Don’t just say leaders. How many, please, if that’s not too much to ask.]

The Kyoto treaty, which Bush rejected, requires industrialized countries to cut their emissions of carbon dioxide and other climate-changing substances on average by 5.2 percent below their 1990 levels.

[Delete: When the president] Bush [we know he’s the president] rejected the treaty in 2001 [Delete: he said the agreement was], calling it fatally flawed because it excluded developing nations [Delete: such as], including China and India. Forcing U.S. businesses to reduce their emissions while letting companies in those countries off the hook would drive up the cost of American products and cost jobs, Bush said.

[Delete: An August report by an administration official indicated that the buildup of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere was the most likely explanation for global warming, a shift from the administration’s previous position of emphasizing the scientific uncertainties of climate change.]

In support of Bush, the administration emphasized the scientific uncertainties of climate change but in August reported [Delete: report by an administration official indicated] that global warming [Delete: the buildup of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere was] is the most likely explanation [Delete: for,] thus producing significant doublespeak. [just kidding about the doublespeak reference, which is what Swanson means or what he says means if he doesn’t know it but may constitute editorializing]

But Bush still believes that rejecting [Delete: the] Kyoto [Delete: accord] was [Delete: the] right [Delete: move], Environmental Protection Agency Administrator [top dog? source of just mentioned August report, unaccountably unsourced by Swanson?] Mike Leavitt [yes, top dog: I looked him up; he’s Michael O. Leavitt, former governor of Utah, though apparently just good old Mike to Swanson] told [Delete: The] Associated Press since the election. [Delete: in a postelection interview with]

In any case [got to have transition here, can’t just string things together, even if the items are pearls], the administration favors voluntary over mandatory measures [Delete: programs] to reduce the emissions from automobiles, power plants and factories that Kyoto supporters blame for warming. Moreover, the administration has [Delete:] also allocated several billion dollars to support [Delete: the] development of new technologies such as hydrogen cells that [Delete: would] power cars without producing carbon dioxide. But such technologies are thought to be many years away from widespread use.

. . . etc. etc., all to make Swanson’s meaning clear, so as to keep readers’ attention.
=================================
More more more, from (now) several blocks away, in the Apparel Center . . . Sun-Times religion writer Cathleen Falsani, who often takes a celebrity approach to her beat – her Hugh Hefner interview comes to mind. – had an 11/12/04 interview with a considerably more attractive subject, a woman who saved Jews from Nazis in the 40s. She opened with fairly feckless questioning: “What is morality? Who is moral? And whose morals are we talking about anyway” but then declined to enter this “Great Moral Debate of ‘04,” writing, “I will demure.”

No. She will be demure about it – reserved, modest, shy? Hardly. No “be” is missing, but an “e” has sneaked in to do damage to her message. She will “demur” – show reluctance. And even then she’s doing more than show reluctance; she is declining or even refusing.

How does one know this? One looks it up in the Compact OED, here and here. The origin “perhaps” of each is the Old French “demourer” – ‘remain, stay’, influenced by ‘mur’ – ‘grave.’ The noun “grave,” so that one is quiet as …? Or the adjective, so that one is very (“tres”) serious. I do not know. I am a copy editor, not a lexicologist.

Check out David Sullum’s today in which he contemns (subjects to withering contempt) tax-funded stadiums. Yes, many the taxpayer, even those rooting in person for the home team, will say yea to that, what with Reinsdorf and friends getting hundreds of million from Mother Illinois for that new thing at 35th & Shields.

But would it not be better if the goateed, bespectacled, earnest-looking (and well-informed) Sullum, a doughty libertarian, had NOT opened with the damning admission that he has gone just once in his life to a major league game and found it boring? Is there no libertarian editor who could have told him, I know what you mean, but you have friends out there for whom this admission constitutes a self-damning admission of unreliability?

Jacob, don’t do it, they would have said. Skip the confession about almost never going to a ball game and being bored when you do. It’s not worth it.

That said, Jacob makes hash of the publicly funded stadium, with special attention today to the imminent rise of the baseball Senators. Its 41,000 seats will cost a half billion-plus in public money raised by a new tax on business, that source of all wealth whom we love to hate. Not to worry, says DC Mayor Anthony Williams, 364 new jobs averaging $260,000 will supply the deficit. (But how many of those jobs are popcorn vendors, how many pouty superstars?)

Furthermore, cruddy Anacostia, where the stadium would be built, will rise with the new Senators, or Nationals or whatever. Yes, with baseball-season in-stadium eateries, etc. Stadiums are a bonanza for parking lot owners and people with big back yards they can pave over or rooftops from which paid spectators can watch the game if the team owners have not blocked their view with various devices. And bars to which game-maddened fans can repair afterwards, yes. This is neighborhood revitalization?

80 economists don’t think so, Sullum tells us. Nothing notable will come of a new stadium, they told the mayor, who almost certainly pitched their letter forthwith into the nearest spittoon. Spending just moves around, they said, citing “a vast body of economic research.” And it normally takes a very strong man to withstand that kind of pressure. In fact, 37 cities were hurt by presence of pro teams 1969-96, according to a Cato Institute paper that had something to say about “significant negative impact on the level of real per capita income.” That sort of talk may go with spectacles and goatees and people who don’t go to games, but should we ignore it?

Meanwhile, in DC Sullum wonders what other effects there will be, thanks to the expected tax on large businesses (whose owners are outnumbered at the pools by owners of small businesses and owners of no businesses) and its expected lowering of wages and raising of prices.

WLS’s Don & Roma raised, dodged issue about 100 lb. female cop overpowered and disarmed by 230 lb. carjacker whom she had pursued into a vacant lot. Made whole issue the dumb one about who�s right, mother who says he�s a good boy or cops who tell bad things he did. Callers immediately raised the other issue, whether this cop was the man for the job. These (male) callers, some of them apparently cops themselves, raised the not-ready issue gingerly and secondarily at first. But it soon became top item, with Don saying several times he didn�t want to talk about it.

Eventually a man called saying he�s a veteran of eight (not nine or seven) bar fights, saying a good small woman or man can get the better of a much bigger guy with the right punch administered quickly. And Roma chimed in to say there are 65 male cops who would also have been disarmed by this big guy. So Chicago�s hot conservative couple dodged the obvious.

What were they thinking when they brought it up in the first place? Tiny female cop easily bested by big offender, and nothing is to be said about lack of physical parity? Callers are put off, Don not wanting to go there, Roma getting defensive? What�s up in Don & Roma Land, newly repopulated by them after long contract-fight hiatus? They sell well and are worth a lot, but was what they say on air part of the dispute? How big a part?

(Yes, these are not newspaper performers, but radio talkers are people too.)

Notice, please, this in today’s Chi Trib, by deputy edit page editor John McCormick, once of Newsweek, about “the press” missing a story because of its insularity. He shows (diplomatically) how Chi Trib ran stories that did not miss the story, in this case how the nation was veering towards “exercised values” vote orientation, while articulating nicely the beef vs. mainstream media — MSM in blogger parlance. Yes, Virginia, Chi Trib is quoting National Review Online, and Newt Gingrich too.

WISE GUY . . . In a Sunday 8/22/04 Chi Trib column, markets writer Bill Barnhart reflects conventional wisdom among newsies in a series of subordinated phrases that demonstrate disaffiliation from Bush:

“Bush must overcome his mess in Iraq.” His was an “ill-fated adventure into military conquest.” He counts on “terrorism hysteria . . . as a political strategy.” The nation is “already made skeptical by the 9/11 Commission report.” The U.S. is in “low esteem” with “other nations.”

Bush has “economic ideologues in his administration.” There have been “record deficits under Bush.” A source says the war is “not going well” and “favors Kerry,” even if he’s “not in the lead now” because of it.

None of this was argued, just taken for granted.

FOLLOWING ONE’S LEAD . . . 8/20/04, Chi Trib finally reported on Swift Boat Vets v. Kerry – when Kerry brought it up. Was not news fit to print before that. Too yucky. Or a vampire requiring stake in heart, as Trib reporter Frank James told E&P. Was result of “too many” news sources out there, said Trib managing editor James O’Shea. Oh the trouble CT has seen, forced by raggedy-ass competition to cover this quite unseemly story about the candidate’s tangled web.

Hey, did NYT cover it? No. So what’s the problem?

A LEAGUE OF HIS OWN . . . And wasn’t it grand the way Chi Trib’s Eric Zorn referred hard-copy readers of his conventional stuff to his really interesting web-site stuff the other day, featuring reader reaction to something or other? Z. has dropped one of his columns to have more time for his web site, whose readership he compared (modestly) to hard-copy Chi Trib circulation but not to Instapundit or other performers in the blogosphere, in whose league he does not play. Not to mention Drudge Report, whose circulation exceeds Chi Trib’s. Nonetheless, Z. should continue trying his hand at blogging. He’s prolific. We have to give him that.

One of his problems, however, is he’s heavy-handed. Tin ear and all that, a sort of Al Gore-like bombs-away delivering of facts on top of facts. Has no sense of merely suggesting, in part because he’s still caught in the hard-copy mode of either plodding recitation or zany fun and games and in part perhaps because of his being a campus brat, which is not to say word one about his parents as persons but to point out the peculiar wordiness and head-tripping into which campus people fall more than your average person. Talking heads come to mind, but more a matter of mind going lickety split and leaving communication behind. Do I make myself clear?

Contrast Z., for instance, with the aforementioned ABC News’s The Note, in which Mark Halperin et al. pull lots of stuff together daily, summarizing and shorthanding pungently and wittily. There’s a knack to that. It beats James Taranto’s Best of the Web, I think, which also gets a bit complicated at times, even while performing indispensably.

ERNIE PYLE? . . . World War II battle reports in Chi Trib and other papers routinely led with numbers dead and wounded, driving home the losses incurred, the better to discourage the home front, as our world was called. Not quite. Instead, the news was about victories or setbacks, with emphasis on the first. But battle reports from Iraq and Afghanistan are mostly about casualties. Why?

FDR DONE IN . . . Point made by MSM (Main Stream Media) reporter in an email to Instapundit about Iraq coverage published 10/21:

It’s frankly impossible to imagine what might have happened to FDR’s presidency if WWII was covered the way the various news media do the job right now. Someone in the blogosphere recently pointed out that 750 American troops died in a training accident during preparations for D-Day. Can you imagine that? Today such an occurrence would have an almost apocalyptic impact in this country, if you consider the way it would be conveyed to the public through television.

HIGH-PRICED . . . The hit man was offered $20G and a city job, says Sun-Times head 10-14-04. The man wanted more than money, he wanted his license to steal.

WE CARE, WE CARE . . . 10/17/04 Sunday Chi Trib featured big in-your-face p-1 color pic of black victim (what else is new?) with story attacking reliability of finger-printing and other forensics measures. Trib Mag cover story same day was on gung-ho pacifist – ahem, peace activist – by the infamous Don Terry, whose story praising former terrorist and current advocate of terrorism William Ayers ran in the Mag on the Sunday after 9/11, requiring a trademark run-of-paper apology by Trib apologist-in-chief (who whines a lot), Don Wyclif. Chi Trib and Terry just can’t stay away from parlor-radical causes. The 10/17 piece even quotes that old parlor radical Studs Terkel – who shot off his mouth after 9/11 about U.S. airmen being terrorists, by the way – who thought highly of the pacifist in question, needless to say.

WE HAVE TO WONDER . . . Chi Trib’s lead business section story, “Anemic profits hurt vaccine supply: Development process deters makers: shortages could persist for decade,” raises questions. It’s all about the flu vaccine business not being profitable enough to justify investing in better technology that would solve mfg.-&-distribution problems. But the demand is huge; why can’t supply meet it? The story hints at a reason:

Companies have difficulty raising prices [essential to making the business attractive] because the government and public health agencies that buy much of the product would create a political stir.

Oh? What’s that all about? New products cost more until mass consumption brings them down, but that’s not allowed in this case?

Companies, though, say the federal government could go a long way to spur more interest in vaccine development.

Oh again. Spurring interest usually means making it profitable. The first move in that direction would be to cancel artificial inhibitions, one would think. Tax break maybe?