By the time this column appears, people may well say “Jill Carroll who?” But during the couple of weeks of her peak fame, in late March and early April 2006, she was the “it” girl in every American newspaper, every news show on television. She had been taken hostage in Iraq, appeared in a burqua pleading for her life and denouncing the American presence in Iraq -- and then, suddenly, was freed. How the newspapers and television shows lionized her! Jill Carroll this, Jill Carroll that; what her sister thinks, what her family things, what she thinks. She was a “heroine.” Am I the only one who remains unconvinced of this? In fact, I'd say the whole Jill Carroll “thing” is very troubling, a sign of how we as a society have got some things very wrong indeed.

I don't doubt the human interest of covering Jill Carroll's captivity and release. It's like Pauline tied to the tracks in the “Perils of Pauline” -- will she escape the villains? In some ways she was the most recent example of what some commentators have called the “white girl in trouble” news article: it's not on the evening news unless the victim is young, white, and female. Besides, everybody likes a homecoming, which she duly provided. In fact, I think she's probably my kind of gal: intelligent, articulate, someone who went to Iraq on her own to file freelance news stories to inform us back at home about what's what with the war.

But I did note several things that made me scratch my head. Was this really the news item it was treated as? I mean, she wasn't a combatant, her captors seemed to have treated her well, they seem to have concluded they'd made something of a mistake in nabbing her, as she was “a friend of the Iraqi people” -- as those pleading for her release pointed out. So it seems to have been a relatively minor incident that didn't mean much of anything. Could the jubilation, the fuss and bother, possibly have something to do with the fact that she was a journalist being covered by journalists?

That thought gives me vertigo, the notion that the delivery of the news really has taken the place of the news itself. I've always had trouble accepting that news deliverers themselves become the celebrities, the medium replacing the message. Probably I just need to get with the program: this is America, folks. Mere days after Carroll's release, after all, Katie Couric's switch to CBS from the Today Show was front-page (and Today Show) banner news. I'd say, who cares? But that's me. I didn't care when Matt Lauer got a haircut either. And I remember picking my jaw up off my steering wheel the first time I saw a billboard along the West Side Highway in New York with a picture of Tom Brokaw that read, “If it ain't Brokaw, fix it.” Huh? And here I thought he was just the conduit of the news. Turns out he was the news.

But back to why this Carroll thing continues to annoy me. She was released in one piece! Airplane loads of American wounded are taken back to Ramstein AFB for treatment every day. If they don't make it, they come back to Dover AFB in a box. Who's covering that? Oh, I forgot. The Bush Administration made that one off limits. So maybe the only option of the news shows is to make a heroine out of a woman who wasn't even mistreated and came back to her family.

Was she a lesson on how to comport yourself under pressure? Perhaps she was an illustration of Sen. McCain's point that torture isn't a valid interrogation means because people will say anything to avoid it. That may be why the good Senator came out publicly on her side. To be sure, Carroll wasn't tortured. But certainly she was fearful of her life: the result was her statements in the videos.

Not that there's anything wrong with the view that the US wasn't justified in going in to begin with, or that we should by now be on our way home: a lot of respectable people hold those views. Nor is it to Carroll's discredit that she gave the men with the guns what they wanted. That's what the bank teller is told to do, after all, in case of a robbery. Just give the money, and we'll deal with the repercussions afterwards. So she was clearly a smart woman who didn't lose her head.

But still. Just what was it she did that was so fabulous? This is a war where my students -- the one I've lavished time and love on -- are about to ship out and may be among those who come back to Ramstein, or Dover? Maybe I'm taking this too personally.

Carroll wasn't toting a rifle; the government didn't send her there; she wasn't signed on to a program that required her making daily sacrifices (the sacrifices she made she made voluntarily, to get the story, necessary though it is to get those stories). She wasn't even sent by a newspaper; she went on her own. She got in the way of some crazies, and she got nabbed, and then was un-nabbed.

Okay, I'm glad she's alive, and I'm glad she got back to her family. But ultimately Jill Carroll and the hoopla of her captivity and her release seems more a comment on the decadent nature of our society than on the war in Iraq. Which of course is just what the Islamic militants say.

But tell me they're not just a little right.