Andrew Beaujon
May 3, 2013
12:33 pm
GlobalPost |
Boston.com |
CJR
James Foley, a freelance journalist for Agence France-Presse and GlobalPost who's been missing in Syria since last November, was likely "
abducted by a pro-regime militia group and subsequently turned over to Syrian government forces,” GlobalPost CEO and President Philip Balboni says.
Based on what we have learned, it is likely Jim is being held with one or more Western journalists, including most likely at least one other American.
The article notes that McClatchy and Washington Post freelancer Austin Tice has also
been missing in Syria since last August. I asked McClatchy Washington Bureau Chief James Asher whether they had any information about Tice being the journalist referenced in Balboni's quote.
"Since August we continue to worry about his safety and hope for his eventual return to his family," he said via email. "Unfortunately there is little more we can say now."
(more...)
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Al Tompkins
Apr. 11, 2013
12:20 pm
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Mar. 21, 2013
9:24 am
Journalists who were present remember when Saddam Hussein’s statue came down in Baghdad’s Firdos Square on April 9, 2003:
The photographer Gary Knight saw more journalists and Marines than actual civilians. And those Iraqis he saw, he said, seemed to be “doing it for the benefit of the cameras” at what amounted to little more than a media event. Just beyond the view of he cameras, the square was mostly empty. Lt. Tim McLaughlin, the Marine tank commander whose American flag ended up briefly atop the statue before it fell, drily observed that it was hardly a turning point, just “an event that for me occurred probably between 4:10 in the afternoon and 4:25 in the afternoon.”
Ten years after the invasion, it is clear that the moment hardly heralded a clean and decisive victory. If anything, the news coverage raises questions about the role the news media played in the run-up to the war and the toll it took on soldiers and civilians.
Related: The Toppling: How the media inflated a minor moment in a long war (The New Yorker)
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James Estrin, The New York Times
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Andrew Beaujon
Mar. 19, 2013
10:25 am
The Huffington Post |
Salon |
CPJ |
CNN
McClatchy's
Jonathan Landay tells Michael Calderone that
Twitter may have worked as an equalizer as the media trotted out the Bush administration's casus belli.
“What would have happened if there had been the kind of reporting by everybody else we had been doing?” Landay asked. “Would it have been so easy to have taken this country to war and see so many people lose their lives and so much blood and treasure expended -– for what?”
Landay, whose employer was at the time named Knight Ridder, provided some of the only skeptical mainstream reporting before the war, along with
Warren Strobel. He tells Calderone that national security is the "toughest beat in town":
"You still have that same game of access going on, where you’re given information and you write it down as your told because you want to be able to maintain access and not take the time to check it out.”
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Mar. 7, 2013
2:03 pm
NBC’s Richard Engel describes being kidnapped in Syria:
A group of about 15 armed men were fanning out around us. Three or four of them stood in the middle of the road blocking our vehicles. The others went for the doors. They wore black jackets, black boots, and black ski masks. They were professionals and used hand signals to communicate. A balled fist meant stop. A pointed finger meant advance. Each man carried an AK-47. Several of the gunmen began hitting the windows of our car and minivan with the stocks of their weapons. When they got the doors open, they leveled their guns at our chests.
Time was slowing down as if I’d been hit in the head. Time was slowing down as if I were drowning.
This can’t be happening. I know what this is. This can’t be happening. These are the shabiha. They’re fucking kidnapping us. …
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NBC correspondent Richard Engel, writing for Vanity Fair
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Andrew Beaujon
Feb. 19, 2013
4:37 pm
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Jeff Sonderman
Nov. 28, 2012
3:54 pm
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Jeff Sonderman
Nov. 15, 2012
1:30 pm
BuzzFeed | All Things D | YouTube | Facebook | Washington Post
The Israeli Defense Forces is making aggressive use of social media like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook to document and justify its latest assault on Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
BuzzFeed's Matt Buchanan documents how the
@IDFSpokesperson account "
basically declared war on Hamas" and has been tweeting photos and videos of the assault. He writes:
[The IDF's] live-tweeting its assault on Hamas may well be the most meaningful change in our consumption of war in over 20 years. This is something new. (more...)
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