Today's NYTimes carries these two items in its international news in brief:

MEXICO: GUNMEN STORM BORDER NEWSPAPER Two heavily armed men burst into the Nuevo Laredo offices of the border city's largest newspaper, El Mañana, on Monday night, threw a hand grenade and sprayed bullets at more than 20 reporters and editors. One reporter, Jaime Orozco, was shot and seriously wounded. Several others were injured by flying glass. The gunmen escaped, their motive unknown. Officials at the newspaper said the use of heavy weapons suggested that the attack had been ordered by drug dealers. President Vicente Fox condemned the assault and ordered his attorney general to investigate. "To organized criminals, I say again, you will not defeat the people of Mexico," he said. JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr. (NYT)

EUROPE

TURKEY: TRIAL OF JOURNALISTS BEGINS The trial of five newspaper columnists charged with insulting the country's courts got under way in Istanbul in what is seen as another test of the relationship between Turkey and the European Union, which has called for increased rights to free expression in Turkey. The journalists — Ismet Berkan, Murat Belge and Haluk Sahin of the liberal newspaper Radikal, and Hasan Cemal and Erol Katircioglu of the center-right newspaper Milliyet — had criticized court rulings that tried to block an academic conference on the Armenian genocide, its first public discussion in Turkey. They are charged under the same law as was the author Orhan Pamuk, who publicly questioned Turkey's official denial of the genocide, and face prison terms of 6 months to 10 years if convicted. The case against Mr. Pamul brought Turkey international scorn, and his charges were dropped last month. A group of European Parliament observers is attending the current trial, which was adjourned to April 11. (AP)

It's an interesting juxtaposition, suggesting accidentally that these two items are part of a single larger story. Um, that would be the story of the fight for freedom of the press in the darkest third world. Problem is that Nuevo Laredo isn't exactly the third world--I've been there, strange to say--and neither is Turkey, which comes under the heading "Europe." Turkey is easier to place as third world, of course, because of the whole Islam thing. But the free press item where there's actual bloodshed is the Mexican one, where the cause of the assault on the newspaper is the organized supply of a very first world demand, i.e. the drug trade.

One recurring theme in mainstream reporting on 3rd world assaults on press freedom is a belief that they come from a kind of uncivilized popular opinion--that is, that it's the fault of the people in the 3rd world, who just aren't mature enough to know that it's only words. Hm. Is that really so 3rd world? I don't think so. But without arguing that point, check out what this position implies about public opinion.

There is an assumption that public opinion simply exists, like a fact of nature. Because the 3rd world don't believe in free expression, spontaneous riots appear. Riots are a simple and direct expression of public opinion.

I set out to research exactly this sort of thing twenty years ago, and ten years ago I published a book called Violence against the Press. One of the things I found was that the important incidents of violence against the press were never "spontaneous" and were almost always political. They grew out of long and deep struggles over power. The violence itself was not an expression of public opinion but a moment in a struggle over representing public opinion.

And that's the point. Public opinion never exists until it is represented. It's not like my opinion and your opinion, which simply exist whether anyone knows them or not. I DO have an opinion about CBS news, whether anyone knows it or not. It's not public opinion until it is represented publicly. Two hundred years ago everyone knew this. In the so-called 3rd world, everyone still knows this. In the so-called 1st world, people have willfully forgotten this, believing that, because Gallup and Roper call you at home, public opinion is simply the aggregation of everyone's private opinion. I'm very glad it's not. Who knows what our racial politics would look like then, for instance?

POSTSCRIPT: an earlier post noted that moments like the current protest against caricatures of the prophet usually produce martyrs. In the Italian press, much attention has been paid to an Italian priest, murdered in a church by a 16-year-old who confessed and said he was motivated by outrage over the caricatures. Nothing I say should minimize the awfulness of acts like these. They are crimes. In Turkey's case, the crime is being prosecuted in an orderly fashion, but then, again, it's Europe.