Loose vs. Lose.
They’re not interchangeable.
This shit irritates me, CBS News.
So many people do this. I can never quite handle it.
Even though she had been to so many conflicts, so many front-lines, she never lost her humanity and her ability to see with a new way of seeing it and to bring that humanity to all of us and I think that’s what made her so remarkable. She was such a brave, such a good reporter, but so very human even in the midst of all this inhumanity.
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CNN’s Anderson Cooper reflects on his interview with journalist Marie Colvin hours before she was killed in Syria. (source) I’m reminded of the film “City on Fire” (released in come countries as “5 days of war”) which centers on the job and motivations of war journalists, and sometimes the lengths they go to for important footage and getting it to the public. The film dramatizes it a bit, but the dangers are generally real. I wrote a post about the Dili Massacre of 1991 in East Timor. It was recorded on camera by two American journalists. They had to smuggle the tape through another friend travelling in a different direction, because the Indonesian authorities had tipped off Australian customs, who would have confiscated it. The fact that they willingly go into war zones to bring the truth of war and conflict to the masses, and also have to dance with governments which would bury their evidence… They deserve all the respect which most people don’t give them. |
The French journalist who was wounded in an attack on the Syrian city of Homs on Wednesday has asked to be evacuated from Syria quickly.
Edith Bouvier was injured in the attack that killed journalists Marie Colvin and Remi Ochlik in the Baba Amr suburb.
In a video posted online by opposition activists, Ms Bouvier says she has a broken femur and needs an operation.
She says she needs a ceasefire and a medically equipped vehicle to take her to the Lebanese border.
In a separate video, British photographer Paul Conroy, who was also injured in the attack, says he is being looked after by the medical staff of the Free Syrian Army.
He stresses that he is with them as a guest and that despite three large wounds to his leg he is “absolutely OK”.
A soldier reads a copy of Malaya during the 1986 People Power Revolution in the Philippines. (Photo by Joe Galvez)
Later in the afternoon of Feb. 22, Joe received a call (he said it was from Louie Beltran of the Philippine Daily Inquirer), who asked if he had heard about a report that the forces of Armed Forces chief of staff Gen. Fabian Ver had orders to arrest dozens of opposition leaders, as well as journalists in the Mosquito or Alternative Press, and haul them off to some detention facility on an island. The two friends counseled each other to take precautions and stay in touch.
-Lourdes Molina-Fernandez
‘EDSA is not just four days in February’: A first-person account
“City on Fire”
My friend and I went out yesterday with few objectives in mind. We did end up with the Asian pasttime of going to a mall, where we decided to pass time watching a movie, without planning ahead what movie to watch.
We ended up with “City on Fire.” We didn’t know what it was about before buying the tickets, then later went to the poster, where there was a convenient small description to the side.
From then I was sold. A movie about war journalists and correspondents reaches straight into my heart and pulls on it.
I have seen better films, but the message just resonated with me. War correspondents and journalists go into combat to bring out the truth of war, in all its tragedies, to people like us who are far removed from it. I think the real passion for it came from the Vietnam War, where it had such a direct impact on people.
At this point, much fewer people care. They’re desensitized. I think if similar video footage of a small girl with her skin peeling off from a napalm strike came out, it wouldn’t move people the way it did back then. We see so much in film, TV, gaming, and even in the news, that it’s lost its effect.
The irony is that part of the motivation of bringing that disturbing reality to film is the same: they want to show people what it’s really like. That was the purpose of “Saving Private Ryan”, but now every war movie tries to hit that same level of gritty reality. We come to expect it.
War correspondents and journalists know this. They hope to provide the most vivid accounts to wake people up to the tragedy that they themselves are witnessing. Privy to it as they often are, I imagine it’s hard for them to work so hard to bring the harsh truth out when everyone’s too busy watching sitcoms or similar fare. But I imagine they don’t see any other choice in the matter.
The film focuses on one journalist, who lost a close colleague in Iraq, but gets cleared to go to Georgia when Russia invaded it in 2008. The film itself is a little one-sided against the Russians, but I think that’s to be expected since the Russian army was doing the invading. I think their portrayal of the Georgian president was also highly sympathetic, not to mention that it weighed heavily on the idea that Georgia was trying to Westernize and that got it in trouble.
It’s true, Georgia was, and still is, pandering to NATO and the EU, and Russia felt threatened. I just think it’s not telling the entire truth to suggest that that was necessarily a good thing to do, and that Russia were Bad Invaders.
Putin played a Clausewitzian game in 2008. Using warfare as a tool of statecraft and diplomacy, he forcefully ensured that the West recognize Russia’s sphere of influence, and that it needed to be respected. Georgia was highly provocative, especially its president, with all their diplomatic moves. They could hardly expect that Russia wouldn’t have a reaction. People died as a result, as always happens.
The Russians, and especially their volunteer Cossack, Ossetian and Abkhazian militias, were easily portrayed as bombing and shooting civilians with the hinted suggestion of forced relocation of Georgians out of the occupied zones. I don’t think that’s entirely accurate.
And that’s the tragedy. The power game is played, and people die. That’s the saddest reality of war, and in this simple point the film missed the point. It wasn’t that invaders made all the tragedies. It’s that anytime there’s warfare, there’s tragedy.
This is the difference between journalism and commentary.
As Libyan rebels entered Tripoli yesterday, Sky News reporter Alex Crawford appeared to be the only Western broadcast reporter on the scene.
How’d she do it? How’d she broadcast from the capital?
According to the Daily Telegraph “the astonishing footage from the streets of Tripoli was produced using an Apple Mac Pro laptop computer connected to a mini-satellite dish that was charged by a car cigarette lighter socket.”
Somewhere MacGyver is smiling.
