Jill Carroll--the disposable freelancer picking up the slack for the hypocrites of the MSM viaThe Big Carnival: March 2006

Jill Carroll is not an employee of the Christian Science Moniter. Fooled me. David Paulin at the Big Carnival exposes some dirty laundry and major hypocrisy by the members of the antique MSM who, on one hand proport to be the Most High and Holy Guardians of High Standards and public trust against knuckle dragging bloggers "poaching" on their exclusive territory and their secret use of cheap, disposable freelance writers.

The Big Carnival: March 2006: "Faced with plummeting advertising revenues, media organizations have slashed their staffs and operating budgets in the past couple of decades in pursuit of ever greater profits. One of the causalities have been foreign news bureaus. As a consequence, many outlets have turned increasingly to freelancers like Carroll. Compared to staff writers, they're cheap.

Carroll freelanced for The Christian Science Monitor and several other publications -- in other words, she got paid per article. I don't know what she was earning. But as a former freelance foreign correspondent who has written for some of the same publications as Carroll, including the San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Globe and Platts Oilgram News, I assume she got a few hundred dollars per article. It's really not much for a multi-source showcase piece, written from a war zone amid myriad inconveniences and risks: electrical outages, irregular phone service, and vicious Muslim terrorists not inclined to look kindly upon an American woman writing for a paper called The Christian Science Monitor, for which she'd be working on assignment.

Clearly, idealism, ambition, and a spirit of adventure are the motivating forces driving Carroll and other freelancers working abroad. And more than a few are encouraged by editors who suggest their freelancing may eventually lead to staff positions with a regular salary and usual benefits – the very things one expects in any decent job, whether an office or coal mine.

Carroll would have enjoyed none of the benefits enjoyed by staff writers in Iraq: No bullet-proof vests; no war-zone training; no armed guards. Forget about insurance of any kind. (The Christian Science Monitor, to be sure, has yet to comment publicly on these issues; however, it appears she was not treated like a typical freelancer.) Even so, she was on her own, living in what The New York Times described as a modest 'threadbare' room -- all for the love of journalism.

There's a certain hypocrisy at play when one compares the media's attitude toward freelancers like Carroll against the values it professes as a noble and vigilant watchdog of the public's trust. Consider the mining accident at the Sago mine in West Virginia, which occurred just days before Carroll's kidnapping. The mainstream media raised its collective voice in anger over even a hint of safety violations at the mine. Yet when it comes to journalists like Carroll, it tolerates and even encourages the same abuses it would gleefully excoriate in those who fall into its journalistic cross hairs."