24 reality

The new season of 24 started on Sunday, and I couldn't be more excited. Jack is back, Chloe's still hilariously weird, and the edge-of-your-seat storyline makes up for the occasional bad acting and/or completely implausible subplot. Anyway, I turned on my computer tonight after coming back from dinner with my roommates, and I saw that the top story is an update on a female journalist in Iraq who's been captured; her kidnappers are threatening to kill her in 72 hours if the U.S. doesn't release all female Iraqi prisoners. This is only one in a long line of journalists who have been captured during times of war, but I guess Jill's story hit a little closer to home - she's 28, a graduate of the University of Massachusetts, has written for the Boston Globe and the Christian Science Monitor (a nonreligious newspaper based in Boston), and grew up in Ann Arbor.

I suppose it sounds childish, but why aren't there any rules in international conflicts? On 24, even if the situation looks hopeless, you always know that eventually Jack Bauer will save the day, even if he's currently unconscious, wounded, and been abandoned by the U.S. government. But in the uglier world of real life, who saves an innocent woman like Jill Carroll? Journalists and the media, however often we give them a bad rap for slanted reporting, are the only windows we as the general public have on events happening around the world. No one can understand, sympathize, or change what's going on in Iraq without journalists abroad to show us the reality of the situation.

As much as there are international regulations for war, what's to stop it from becoming "by whatever means necessary"? Jill can be used as leverage, so it's done. Maybe there aren't a lot of innocent targets to choose from, but it just seems like whatever organization has captured her is shooting itself in the foot - without the media, the public has no way of knowing the truth of the situation and subsequently applying pressure to the government to change the status quo.

Sometimes it's hard to distance myself from what's going on when I watch 24 - on Monday I was imagining myself in the shoes of those hostages that were dragged in front of the video camera and then executed. What would I be thinking? What would I say? Would I be calm or hysterical? Would I pass out from sheer terror? The only way I can watch those scenes is to remember that it's all made up by TV writers - until a story like this shows up in the news. Those scenes are this woman's reality.