ANNIE GARRELS ROCKS: She really does. She's so even-handed and understated and admirably cynical and she's been right there in Baghdad throughout. And I can call her Annie cause I'm down with her like Neal Conan. Here she is getting Sun-Times love:

In the case of NPR's woman in Baghdad, Anne Garrels, there are volumes to be read in the unpolished, unrehearsed, admirably unprogrammed way she reports the news. If some war reporters project a Scud-Studly eager-beaverness, she doesn't mind letting you know how lucky you are not to be in her shoes. There may be no one on the air who better conveys the difficult mood swings that this kind of assignment can produce, or its utter lack of glamor.

Sydney Shanberg, the former New York Times journalist portrayed by Sam Waterston in the Cambodian drama, "The Killing Fields," recently wrote in the Village Voice of "the adrenaline high that fuels this news-gathering drive" and the "subconscious notions of immortality" that "may begin to rattle around in your psyche." Garrels seems fueled by an adrenaline low, her sense of self kept in check after all her years in embattled places--Chechnya, Bosnia, Kosovo, Israel, Tiananmen Square, to name a few--by her highly evolved sense of mortality.

As if chatting with a stateside friend on the phone, she makes little attempt to keep in check her weariness or anxiety or disregard for simplified accounts of what's going on. Embedded with Iraqi civilians, or as much as she can be under the close control of state officials (for her, life in the Palestine Hotel is "kinda like reform school"), she reported how surreal life in the streets was in the days before the initial assaults, when people were doing next to nothing to prepare for them. Through her unjaded commentary, you could appreciate the "thud, thud, thud" of bombs hitting the city and the emotions being felt by the Iraqi people we hear so much about but don't often hear.

I hope when people are writing the media history of this war they give some room for strong individual efforts like Garrels', and don't get bogged down in endless blathering about Al Jazeera and Fox News and so on. Yes I do.