Reader-funded foreign correspondent

Two days ago three intrepid American backpackers bid their ill fourth companion a speedy recovery at their hotel in Kurdistan and set off for a trek through the Northern Zagros mountains, the forested land pouring with waterfalls that spring toward the Tigris and Euphrates. Happening on the activity one would perhaps most like to avoid in such a place, they wandered into Iran where they were soon arrested. Thanks to their satellite phone and sick companion, I presume from reports, they are being tracked down and negotiated for.

My first thought about this news was curiosity about the lands they were trekking. So much pizazz and spin surrounds our attention, that a few hikers cuts through those representations to a resonating intrigue: What were they there to see? Which leads to more questions like, What do those mountains look like? What grows and lives there? What is their history? What are the people like? So, of course, I was a mouse-potato for a good while.

During which time, I discovered Michael J. Totten's blog. Apparently, like those hikers, he is guided by a curiosity and attraction to the landscapes and people of the Middle East and, unlike the hikers, is a seasoned traveler who negotiates scenarios with perspicacity, the result being immunity to the hikers' situation. A note on being reader-funded, I am willing to pay for quality news. I don't know why journalists are having a such a temper-tantrum. If the news sources are delivering what we can't get on 24 hour cable news, then we will do what it takes to get it. I subscribe to periodicals that give me information I want. This guy is funded by individuals. Who says people don't want good investigative journalism? Au contraire: build it and they will come.

More importantly, the result are communiques detailing both his man-on-the-street musings with locals, such as "How do people here feel about Americans?" and his savvy inquiries into local socio-political attitudes, options, and interests. Much as with the hikers in the news, the virtualized media ether withdraws from these reports, replaced instead by his immediate constraints of necessity and accident. An interview is short because his paramilitary escorts must not be waylayed by a coming storm; regional coverage is biased by the whim of a picturesque trek. Is the bias of cultural geography any less investigatory than the bias of reporting gunfall from allied havens?

With respect to conflicts whose roots may be better understood by studying the topological map than the ideologies of politicians, probably not.