Even in death...

...women tend to be treated as accessories to the main event.

"Three members of a UK family - named as Saad al-Hilli, 50, from Surrey, his wife and mother-in-law - were shot dead near Lake Annecy on Wednesday" [BBC]

Notice how the dead people are a named person (male) and unnamed female identified by her relationship to the man, and another unnamed female identified by her relationship to the man.

Would it not be just as accurate and somewhat easier to say:

"Three members of a UK family - named as Iqbal al-Hilli,  from Surrey, her husband and mother - were shot dead near Lake Annecy on Wednesday"

But that never happens, does it?

His what?

From New Zealand News site "Stuff":

"In a Bonnie and Clyde-style stand-off, an Okato farmer pulled a sawn-off shotgun from the boot of his car and said: "Bro, you got five seconds to back off or I'm going to shoot you."

Right behind him on New Plymouth's Devon St West was his woman."

His woman.

His woman.

His woman.

Wow.

Reporting from the Field, Literally.

I think television journalism has officially lost the plot when it comes to reporting from the scene.  What, after all, is the point of reporting from the scene. It seems that the television networks think it is all about immediacy.  About being there.  About action.  About pretty backdrops vaguely suggestive of action when no action is actually accessible to the camera.

But it isn't.  Reporting from the field is about context.  And recent coverage of the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords and others makes it clear that this is another thing entirely.

Field reporting is about telling us information in the setting where it makes the most sense and is the most true and coherent.  Thus, if you are telling us about how the shots were fired and how people responded, it might make sense to be at the scene of the shooting.  If you are talking about community grief and compassion you might stand in front of the spontaneous tributes of flowers and notes.

But if you are talking to a doctor about a procedure performed to release pressure on a victim's brain you should probably conduct that interview in an office or hospital room.  Not out in a grassy area with a small black table more suggestive of a magic trick than an operating room--where the doctor is left patting the skull symbolic of a fallen hero as if it is a pet rabbit. When you are talking about a possibly life saving surgery the most appropriate context may, in fact, be a room.

WTF of the Week

"...the meeting was tempered with sadness as the family learned their smiling, blue-eyed, blonde ponytailed little girl had spent most of her life as a virtual slave." [Huffington Post]

Okay, so an eleven-year-old girl is abducted, imprisoned and raped over a period of eighteen years. That is not a virtual slave. That is an actual slave.

The Arizona Strip Search Case

It is a clash of the great moral panics of our time. Is suspicion of drug possession ground for strip searching a 13-year-old girl?

I find it interesting that Justice David Souter clearly knows which bogeyman scares him more. He compares the alleged possession of ibuprofen to a "dead kid" and strip search a girl in a way that was humiliating enough to cause her to drop out of that school despite being a conscientious honor student as just a little "embarrassment". So that's okay then.

Meanwhile another girl caught with a terrifying drug, the birth control pill, was suspended and threatened with expulsion. I can't help but wonder if this is partly due to the powers that be and their attitudes about schoolgirls and the pill? (In an area where 1/4 to 1/2 of students are sexually active).

Or is it just that in both cases a zero tolerance policy is the next best thing to a lobotomy? Because the fear of any and all objects in pill form seems to be far more important than a girl's dignity, control over her own body, and access to education.