An Iraqi national with a fascinating background,
Ghaith Abdul-Ahad has been
documenting the situation in Iraq. His video report is in three parts on YouTube (
1,
2,
3). Of particular note is the cemetery on the outskirts of Sadr City (at 2:13 of segment 2), which is disturbing beyond words.
posted by dbiedny
on Aug 18, 2008 -
14 comments
As Iraqis See It. "About a year ago,
McClatchy Newspapers set up a blog exclusively for contributions from its Iraqi staff. '
Inside Iraq,' it's called, and several times a week the Iraqi staff members post on it about their experiences and impressions. 'It's an opportunity for Iraqis to talk directly to an American audience,' says Leila Fadel, the current bureau chief. As such, the blog fills a major gap in the coverage." Previously discussed
here.
[Via disinformation.]
posted by homunculus
on Jan 15, 2008 -
10 comments
Time magazine recently launched a new politics blog,
Swampland. The blog is, to this point, most interesting for its confrontations between the commenters and the bloggers. [m.i.]
posted by ibmcginty
on Jan 26, 2007 -
26 comments
The big payback in Iraq. Last night on the Newshour with Jim Lehrer, ROBERT LICHTER, President, Center for Media and Public Affairs put forth the following:
You know, Charlie Peter, a great Washington journalist, once said, "The message of Watergate was dig, dig, dig, but journalists thought the message was act tough." And so I think you're getting negative coverage that may be kind of compensatory criticism.
Should the news focus more on the
optimistic elements or is it reflecting
public opinion. Is "compensatory criticism" justified for what it might wrongly perceive as possible White House manipulation during the run up to the war?
posted by Skygazer
on Mar 23, 2006 -
22 comments
We don't not make deals with terrorists. Yesterday,
the Guardian reported: "Kidnappers threatened to kill the abducted US journalist Jill Carroll unless the Bush administration ordered the release of Iraqi women prisoners within 72 hours, according to a report on al-Jazeera television yesterday." Today,
the BBC reports "Iraq's ministry of justice has told the BBC that six of the eight women being held by coalition forces in Iraq have been released early. The six were freed because there was insufficient evidence to charge them, a justice ministry spokesman said." Cause, meet effect. Effect, this is cause.
posted by insomnia_lj
on Jan 18, 2006 -
48 comments
Pentagon bribery scandal -- Iraqi journalists bought out. Officials in Washington have admitted that the US military has bribed Iraqi journalists with under-the-table payoffs of up to $200 a month -- twice the average Iraqi monthly income -- for producing upbeat newspaper, radio and television reports about the war in Iraq. This follows
a similar report yesterday that the military secretly paid Iraqi newspapers to run dozens of pro-American articles written by the US Information Operations Task Force in Baghdad. A Pentagon spokesman described the report as "troubling". "This article raises some questions as to whether or not some of the practices that are described in there are consistent with the principles of this department."
posted by insomnia_lj
on Dec 1, 2005 -
62 comments
NEWSWEEK's Baghdad bureau chief, departing after two years of war and American occupation, has a few final thoughts. A short, yet refreshingly honest, look at Iraq from a respected journalist on the way home.
What went wrong? A lot, but the biggest turning point was the Abu Ghraib scandal. Since April 2004 the liberation of Iraq has become a desperate exercise in damage control. The abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib alienated a broad swath of the Iraqi public. On top of that, it didn't work. . . . The four-square-mile Green Zone, the one place in Baghdad where foreigners are reasonably safe, could be a showcase of American values and abilities. Instead the American enclave is a trash-strewn wasteland of Mad Max-style fortifications. The traffic lights don't work because no one has bothered to fix them. The garbage rarely gets collected. Some of the worst ambassadors in U.S. history are the GIs at the Green Zone's checkpoints. They've repeatedly punched Iraqi ministers, accidentally shot at visiting dignitaries and behave (even on good days) with all the courtesy of nightclub bouncers—to Americans and Iraqis alike.
posted by caddis
on Jun 6, 2005 -
51 comments
Sy Hersh's Loose Relationship with the Literal Truth | Interesting article from
NY Metro which seems to condem Hersh's squirrely handling of facts while admiring his accomplishments & tenacity: "In bending the truth, Hersh is, paradoxically enough, remarkably candid. When he supplies unconfirmed accounts of military assaults on Iraqi civilians, or changes certain important details from an episode inside Abu Ghraib (thus rendering the story unverifiable), Hersh argues that he’s protecting the identities of sources who could face grave repercussions for talking. 'I defend that totally,' Hersh says of the factual fudges he serves up in speeches and lectures."
posted by jenleigh
on Jun 2, 2005 -
33 comments
Home From Iraq: photojournalist Molly
Bingham was
detained
in 2003 by Iraqi security forces and held in Abu Ghraib prison from March
25 to April 2, 2003. Eighteen days after her release, she returned to Iraq to
pursue stories for The New York Times, The Guardian of London and others. Taking
a short break during the summer of 2003, Bingham had the idea of working on a
story to explore
who
was
involved
in the
nascent
resistance
that was becoming
apparent
throughout
Iraq.
In August 2003, Bingham returned with British journalist
Steve
Connors and spent the next 10 months reporting the story of the Iraqi resistance.
Her account was published in Vanity Fair magazine in July 2004; Connors shot a
documentary film on the subject. This experience has led Bingham to seriously
question the values and responsibilities of the press.
posted by stenseng
on May 11, 2005 -
65 comments
From her perspective, it was just opening fire by a tank. Giuliana Sgrena, the freed Italian journalist who was shot at by American troops upon her release, sets the record straight: there was no checkpoint, she was on a secure VIP road that runs directly from the Green Zone to the Baghdad airport, and her car was shot at from behind.
Transcript,
audio, and
video of an interview with Naomi Klein, who talked to Sgrena in Rome.
posted by muckster
on Mar 28, 2005 -
40 comments
Five Days in Hell - what's it like to be an Iraqi hostage? Canadian war journalist Scott Taylor provides a harrowing account of his recent 5-day ordeal as a hostage of notorious Islamic mujahedin groups. Christopher Delisso has an
interview with Taylor, and blogger Zeyad of
Healing Iraq offers informed local commentary on kidnappings in his post,
"On clerics, fatwas and terrorism."
posted by madamjujujive
on Sep 21, 2004 -
14 comments
On Monday, US Civil Administrator Paul Bremer handed over "sovereignty" to the Interim Government of Iraq in a furtive ceremony, two days ahead of schedule. Not the stuff that independence days are made of. How sovereign is Iraq; what kind of future does the ongoing process offer for that shattered nation; and most significantly, how can a genuinely free, democratic and prosperous Iraq be created? Al-Ahram Weekly, in these special pages, invited Iraqi journalists and intellectuals to provide some answers. via Informed Comment
posted by y2karl
on Jul 2, 2004 -
10 comments
U.S. Army Used Media Cover in Iraq for Own Ends which sounds like a big old bowl of yellow journalism but isn't really, at least I don't think so. It was more to refute the Iraqi Minister of Lies talking about the whooping the Iraqi war machine was delivering to the coalition forces.
The main issue that the reporters had was that they were only getting the one side of the story and not the Iraqi perspective.
But it raises some questions about the supposed objectivity of the media. Is this a proper use of them? To help achieve military goals? Or to try to avoid more unnecessary deaths?
posted by fenriq
on Sep 8, 2003 -
15 comments
GOP Warns TV Stations Not to Air Ad Alleging Bush Mislead the Nation Over Iraq They claim that the
ad itself is dishonest, and cite the obligation of broadcast outlets to be free of misleading information. “
Such obligations must be taken seriously. This letter puts you on notice that the information contained in the above-cited advertisement is false and misleading; therefore, you are obligated to refrain from airing this advertisement.” Despite the implicit threats,
only one station has refused to run the ad, a Fox station.
posted by Ignatius J. Reilly
on Jul 23, 2003 -
74 comments
Turning the tanks on the reporters The Observer's Phillip Knightley writes that
Iraq will go down as the war when journalists seemed to become a target. Predicted
here, discussed "in progress"
here.
The BBC, Al-Jazeera, and the US Committee to Protect Journalists thought it prudent to find out from the Pentagon what steps they could take to protect their correspondents if war came to Iraq... All three organisations concluded that the Pentagon was determined to deter western correspondents from reporting any war from the 'enemy' side; would view such journalism in Iraq as activity of 'military significance', and might well bomb the area.
posted by Ignatius J. Reilly
on Jun 15, 2003 -
25 comments
Arafat on our side? Other than this story (Guardian), I haven't seen much coverage of Yasser Arafat's behind the scenes efforts to protect Western journalists in Iraq. Possibly not the act of the evil man that he's often portrayed as?
posted by daveg
on Apr 3, 2003 -
37 comments
Celebrity TV journalist Geraldo Rivera kicked out of Iraq: Pentagon I had seen Geraldo drawing the map referred to. Geraldo was not "embedded" and therefore acting as a real reporter. Did he give away key info? My suspicion is No. I had earlier seen retired officers (they all retire and then go on TV) make similar marking to show where our forces were on the way toward Baghdad. I knew in advance where Geraldo would conclude his map in the sand because I had seen it on the "embedded" reports on various cable stations.
posted by Postroad
on Mar 31, 2003 -
29 comments
"Now America is reappraising the battlefield, delaying the war, maybe a week and rewriting the war plan. The first plan has failed because of Iraqi resistance. Now they are trying to write another plan." Seems patently obvious, no? But tell Iraqi state television that and suddenly you're speaking from "a position of complete ignorance," according to the White House.
Peter Arnett,
highly respected, Pulitzer Prize winner and the first journalist to
interview Osama Bin Laden on film, wouldn't back down the
last time a network caved into craven submission at hands of the American military, and
he's been sacked by NBC/MSNBC for again refusing to do so. There's no First Amendment case, obviously, and no real surprise that the military would be exerting pressure to maintain control over information, but does the firing of high-profile Arnett for the repeating the obvious increase
anybody's confidence that we're hearing anything resembling the truth?
posted by JollyWanker
on Mar 31, 2003 -
30 comments
Robert Fisk in the Independent Today's front page of the UK broadsheet comprises solely of a text-only report of yesterday's bombing of a Baghdad marketplace, beginning: "It was an outrage, an obscenity. The severed hand on the metal door, the swamp of blood and mud across the road, the human brains inside a garage, the incinerated, skeletal remains of an Iraqi mother and her three small children in their still-smouldering car..."
This is how war reporting should be.
posted by garyh
on Mar 27, 2003 -
110 comments
Embedded? Or In Bed With The Military Spin Doctors? Quite apart from the significant sexual and conspiratorial overtones of the word and concept themselves (when applied to people), there's something more than a little disquieting about the
participant observation aspect of the large-scale practice of
embedded reporting in the current invasion of Iraq - as opposed to the journalistic tradition of direct observation. Altogether too gung-ho - and inevitably so - I'd say. Me no like. And don't really trust myself to be able to epistemologically introduce, in my understanding of what I see, the (already minimal) distance that I'd previously taken for granted in standard reportage. What can be done to offset this bias? [
Here is a very recent, detailed Department of Defense guide to what a media embed consists of [pdf format] and the release journalists must sign in order to be embedded.]
posted by MiguelCardoso
on Mar 22, 2003 -
23 comments
The idea of weblogs has defenitely inspired BBC Online news for making the following pages:
posted by hoder
on Mar 20, 2003 -
4 comments
The War is about to Start and for those of us without a TV we are part of a grand experiment to see if we can be as well informed. According to
this Reuters article, Radio had World War II, Television had Vietnam, Cable TV had the Gulf War and now, the Internet may have the U.S. war with Iraq...reporters and producers with wireless laptops and handheld digital cameras will
file reports from battlefields and military installations. Cameras are at key locations for live feeds 24 hours a day. Interactive, 3-D maps will update troop movements, casualties and weapons used. ''You're combining the speed of television with the depth of print,'' says Mitch Gelman, executive producer of CNN.com. ''This could define how future wars are covered.'' (more inside)
posted by stbalbach
on Mar 19, 2003 -
19 comments
Pentagon threatens to target journalists in Iraq. (RealAudio, 49 minutes into the broadcast.)
In an interview with Radio One Ireland,
Kate Adie, former chief news correspondent for the BBC, drops a bombshell.
If satellite uplinks from the press are detected in Baghdad, they would be "targeted down", said a senior US military official. "They know this. They've been warned."
Ms. Adie also revealed that the US military are openly asking journalists what their feelings are on the war, and are using this information to block reporters from access to reporting on the conflict.
These actions are "shameless" and "entirely hostile to the free spread of information," says Ms. Adie. "What actually appalls me is the difference between twelve years ago and now. I've seen a complete erosion of any kind of acknowledgment that reporters should be able to report as they witness."
posted by insomnia_lj
on Mar 12, 2003 -
74 comments
Why Aren't U.S. Journalists Reporting From Iraq? "This notion that the Iraqi leader is in cahoots with Osama will be easy to feed the American people. To the American people, one bad Arab is the same as the next, and Osama equals Saddam. People who wonder about the Bush war-urgency only need to think about this: there’s a blind spot that needs to be exploited now, before too many journalists get the idea to go inside Iraq and find out what’s really happening. As long as the Condi Rices, Dick Cheneys and other hawks are talking to journalists with no experience inside Iraq, they won’t get a raised eyebrow about this notion that the secular dictator is in bed with the
jihadis -- even though [reports indicate]....the CIA has found no link between the Iraqi dictator and Al Qaeda."
posted by fold_and_mutilate
on Sep 13, 2002 -
55 comments
Media Deception and Iraq An interesting quick story-- one journalist smells a rat in an AP report about Iraq using money to buy weapons, investigates the genesis of the story, and finds more deception. Meanwhile statistics on children dying from sanctions go unpublished.
posted by chaz
on Jul 11, 2001 -
8 comments
