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Cor blimey 

Deputy prime minister John Prescott often tells it as he sees it, an increasingly rare phenomenon in modern politics:

“Fox-hunting? Cor blimey! What are we getting worried about fox-hunting for? Iraq’s a very serious question, fox-hunting isn’t.”

Reporting on the full spectrum 

I don’t think weblogs need to be judged on their success in conventional media, but there’s a significance to The Guardian‘s devoting three-quarters of page one and half of page two to a posting from Kevin Sites‘s weblog.

Read all of Sites’s explanation of what he saw in Falluja. It’s vivid and important. The nub of the analysis for me comes in the peroration:

  In war, as in life, there are plenty of opportunities to see the full spectrum of good and evil that people are capable of. As journalists, it is our job is to report both — though neither may be fully representative of those people on whom we’re reporting. For example, acts of selfless heroism are likely to be as unique to a group as the darker deeds. But our coverage of these unique events, combined with the larger perspective – will allow the truth of that situation, in all of its complexities, to begin to emerge. That doesn’t make the decision to report events like this one any easier. It has, for me, led to an agonizing struggle — the proverbial long, dark night of the soul.

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