Accidental tourist

Friday after posting my promise to discuss some female reporters, I turned too this week's issue of Danish paper Weekendavisen (the only paper that I subscribe to at the moment) and on the front page was editor in chief Anne Knudsen reporting from Iraq. The report is not spectacular in my sense of the word, no remarkable rhetorical strategy or formal concept is put into play, but it is very personal. So there I go. By 'shamelessly taking advantage of her position' (her own words), Anne Knudsen is visiting the Danish military camp in Basra where one of her own sons is stationed too. Her report is certainly not critical - except of other critics - of the work being done by these Danish forces and which is presented to the press on this occasion. Anne Knudsen is there as part of a group and is enthusiastically reporting from a guided tour. Mainly she identifies herself as a worried-but-proud mom and expresses her sympathy with other worried moms (and no, not parents, just mothers are included in the bonding). There is not much of a professional or inquisitive reporter about her when she is watching Iraqi police officers demonstrate how they go about searching cars and concludes that "it looks very convincing to me, but then again I'm only familiar with these things from the movies". At one point she is stressing how she takes special interest in the intelligence work at the camp, because "the truth about Your special correspondent is that I'm wholly and irrevocably an ethnographer or anthropologist at heart", and as such she is trained to make similar 'secret investigations' of local communities. Well, her background as an ethnographer certainly qualifies her for a field trip like this, but she seems to be telling us about this training as just another curious fact about herself on a line with a preference for sea food or liqourice. She is not showing us this professional attitude in action. As it happens, she falls ill and nearly dies from lack of salt in the tremendous heat on site which adds genuine drama to her story, of course, and tells us something about the general working conditions in Basra too. But generally Anne Knudsen's attitude in the text comes across as the attitude of a tourist - in a slightly comic contrast to the photo above which accompanies the article and to her general front cover appearance as chief editor leaving her desk on a special mission. And that's too bad.