US site Radar has an interesting opinion piece on Jill Carroll, the Christian Science Monitor stringer who was taken hostage in Iraq. It’s by Tony Dokoupil. Although Carroll was only a stringer, the Monitor put her on staff whilst she was being held and campaigned hard for her release. When she got out they made the most of her story and Harvard gave her a fellowship. Carroll herself seems modest and shy, not exactly Martha Gellhorn. But here’s Dokoupil’s version of her story:

Step One: Turn cub Carroll into a seasoned journalist and faultless victim. None of the Monitor’s coverage mentions the bad decision that set up her kidnapping — specifically, her self-described “fatal mistake” in prearranging an interview venue, a cardinal no-no in Baghdad where journalists eschew set schedules to avoid giving insurgents a chance to organize an ambush.

Well, at her age I’d been to a few dangerous places. And done some dumb things. Would I expect someone I had a string with to shit-bag me? No. Would I expect a media writer to shit-bag me on the way to making a point…well, we report, you decide.

Step Two: Absolve the Monitor of blame. In a textbook example of a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Offer” security policy, Monitor editor in chief Richard Bergenheim deflected questions about the paper’s protections for freelancers by saying that Carroll didn’t ask for security, like a chase car — an extra vehicle with an armed guard that follows staffers when they leave the hotel. Today the paper’s security policy is theoretically open to all needs … Fearing reprisals — or else manifesting a kind of Stockholm Syndrome identification with the cash-strapped publications that leave them exposed — most reporters, including Carroll, don’t complain.

There’s no military draft. These aren’t child-workers. Journalism in Iraq is a volunteer activity – not the result of a job shortage forcing young people into war-zones. Besides, the overwhelming casualties are Iraqi media workers, not U.S. J-school grads.

Step Three: Exaggerate Carroll’s skills and sell her as an expert. Despite video evidence to the contrary, David Cook described her clearly embarrassed and rambling speech to the Monitor newsroom after her release as “remarkably eloquent.” (She opened with, “I just wanted to say hi. I’ve never been here before,” and followed with an awkward refrain of, “I’m a lowly freelancer. Who am I?”)

What if Cook had called her embarrassed and rambling? She doesn’t sound like she’s selling herself as an expert.

But the most callous examples of reality-control appear on the Monitor’s Jill Carroll Update Blog. Beneath links to a Hollywood-style trailer for Hostage: The Jill Carroll Story, the paper hypes her as “one of the few Arabic-speaking correspondents who have spent this much time observing how insurgents operate.” Carroll is still probably uncomfortable with such statements. She’s branded as an Arabic-speaker, when the truth is that she employed a translator, who was horribly murdered by her abductors. She describes her own Arabic skills as “rudimentary.”

Callousness of Scooter Libby-esque proportions? And what’s with ‘horribly’ murdered Tony? As opposed to ‘politely’ killed? Easy to be picky…

Is she a deserving risk-taker who gamed the system and won? Or is she just another victim of a schizophrenic industry that explicitly discourages risk-taking yet endorses just that — a profession that thinks all’s well that’s rewarded well, no matter how incommensurate the payoff?

Obviously she’s a deserving risk-taker. And, hey — if only the Monitor had washed its hands of her…

After all, as Carroll herself said in a late summer Web Q&A hosted by the Monitor, “I didn’t do anything great, and being kidnapped is not worthy of praise.”

Damn her disarming modesty! Opinions, opinions. Tony — they’re not always worth kicking people for.