Woodruff victim of Vargas proximity?

I read the WashPost piece on the new ABC Evening News team by Howie Kurtz and reflected on the irony of the situation. David Westin’s idea of a team very engaged with following the hottest stories fit the legacy of Peter Jennings, but today’s world remains pock-marked with vicious situations like Iraq, Darfur, Chechnya, Afghanistan, even Lebanon where journalists are either wrong-place-wrong-time casualties or have crosshairs put on them by terrorist groups or intelligence agencies.

After speculating about Woodruff’s projected absence from the Evening News format, mediabistro puts forward a horrific scenario where Woodruff is mentally and talent-wise okay, but badly disfigured. The media watchers are already positing Gibson from Good Morning America as a stand-in for Woodruff while he recovers.

From KIA’s Michael Kelly of Atlantic Monthly and David Bloom to casualties like Bob Woodruff and Doug Vogt to MIAs like Jill Carroll, the profession of Iraq reporter remains fraught with ironic danger. The insanity of all this violence might be addictive or contagious.

Just like the suicide-bombers might have migrated from the Hezbollah crazies in Lebanon of the '80s to frequent use elsewhere, we can foresee that IEDs are sooner or later predictably going to appear in bad neighborhoods in the USA to punish patrolling police. No-Go areas in US cities like LA are proliferating and narco-gangs are taking on the aura of indigenous insurgency movements, as the ascendancy of Evo Morales in Bolivia might portend.

And to end on a totally inappropriate aside on poor Vargas. Does she have some sort of a kiss-of-death curse dogging her footsteps?

First her singer-husband gets shot in the head late last year in Denver.

Then her co-anchor gets shrapnel in the head in Iraq.