Media Captivated by Bush-Threatening Teen

The Sacramento Bee reports that the media can't get enough of Julia Wilson, the California teenager who was investigated by the Secret Service for her "kill Bush" MySpace page.

Once upon a time Julia Wilson dreamed of becoming the next Christina Aguilera, a pop star famous for glamour but not politics. Instead, she's become the next Cindy Sheehan, receiving global attention for displaying her anger at President Bush.

The story of the Sacramento teenager questioned last week by federal agents about her anti-Bush Web page has spread around the world, with newspapers in Egypt, China, Australia and Europe publishing articles about her and national television stations clamoring for interviews.

The 14-year-old McClatchy High School student who posted the words "Kill Bush" -- along with a photo-collage showing a cartoon dagger stabbing the president's hand -- on her MySpace page last year is scheduled to be interviewed today by CNN. She and her father appeared on MSNBC over the weekend and turned down interview requests from Fox News.

"It has been unprecedented in our otherwise mundane existence," said Julia's father, Jim Moose....

Over the weekend, the America Online Web site posted an Associated Press story about Julia along with a poll asking two questions: Whether the Secret Service was right to question the girl (71 percent said yes) and whether her parents should have been included in the questioning (78 percent said yes). More than 560,000 people responded to the poll.

"This is one of our largest polls since the 2004 election," said AOL spokeswoman Dori Salcido. "It generated a lot of interest and traffic, and people were really paying a lot of attention to it."

News outlets around the world grabbed onto the story. A headline in the Middle East Times, an English-language paper in Cairo, declared "US schoolgirl investigated for Bush 'threat'." The International Herald Tribune ran the story beneath a headline that said "California teen questioned over threats to Bush posted on MySpace." The China Post in Taiwan, and numerous papers in Australia and the United Kingdom also ran the story.