WaPo Writer Seriously Injured in Collision with Reality

Washington Post Staff Writer Daniela Deane was seriously injured Monday in a collision between media arrogance and reality, when a disdainful article she wrote about Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was impacted forcefully by a pair of sidebar items that refused to yield to stop for her partisan sarcasm.

Rumsfeld, speaking at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, delivered a blistering attack on the U.S. media, saying that in the present 24-hour news cycle, events in Iraq can be reported too quickly and without context.

He said there was a "jarring contrast between what the American people are reading and hearing about Iraq and the views of the Iraqi people." The Iraqi people and the U.S. military deployed in the country, he said, were optimistic about the progress of the war there.

"Which view of Iraq is more accurate?" Rumsfeld asked. "The pessimistic view of the so-called elites in our country or the more optimistic view of millions of Iraqis and some 155,000 U.S. troops on the ground?

Caught in mid-article as her disdain increased, Deane was first hit by a contextless sidebar screeching "2,000 Deaths in Iraq" towing a death map. As her mangled syntax came to a rest, another sidebar blaring "U.S. Fatalities" hit her head on, crushing her with under a tangle of jagged irony.

Guarded by a point well-proven, Rumsfeld was uninjured in the collision.