From the Frontline: April 2008 Archives
Where next for Zimbabwe?
[video:brightcove:1529447593] The latest debate from the Frontline Club is now online. Following the farcical election in Zimbabwe, the panel discuss the next steps for Zimbabwe. Journalists Patrick Smith from Africa Confidential, Laura Lynch, CBC radio reporter, as well as Tererai Karimakweda of SW Radio Africa and Catherine Phelp who talks...more
Journalist death threats in China
The Foreign Correspondents Club of China released a statement today condemning online death threats received by at least ten foreign correspondents in China following a campaign on the web and in the state-run media following media coverage of protests in Tibet. Melinda Lui, President of the FCCC, talks about the...more
Dan joins the frontline
Welcome to Daniel Bennett, the latest addition to the From the Frontline blog. Daniel offers a unique perspective here. As he says on his blog he is "a PhD student researching the impact of blogging and new media on the BBC's coverage of war and terrorism. He writes about...more
Richard Butler on being held hostage
CBS News journalist Richard Butler discusses his ordeal at the hands of kidnappers in the southern Iraqi city of Basra. He was held for two months until the Iraqi Army rescued him. Butler talks with fellow CBS reporter Allen Pizzey, I am standing there, in front of these eight guys...more
"The ultimate reality show"
Hollywood agent turned war reporter Pat Dollard attempts to put the record straight in The Guardian today. Tony Scott, director of Top Gun, is working with Dollard to put together a TV series from the 700+ hours of film he returned from Iraq with. Dollard's unconventional, drug fuelled style appealed...more
Overseas Press Club Awards 2008
See what happens when you go away for a few days... Another award ceremony. This time the Overseas Press Club. The awards were announced last Friday. Journalists working in conflict zones dominate the winner's rostrum. Getty Images snappers scooped three photography awards and reporters on The New York Times...more
Johann Hari wins the Orwell
The Independent's Johann Hari has won the Orwell Prize for journalism. One of the five stories the judges picked up on was his extraordinary piece about France's role in the Central African Republic - if you haven't already read it, do so - you won't be disappointed. He thanked...more
Barry Bearak retells his Harare prison experience
New York Times reporter Barry Bearak was arrested in Harare during the farcical election process that began last month, and that continues with no firm outcome a month after it began. He retells his story in the American press, I'd been caught at it red-handed, my notes spread across my...more
Journalists stamped
Five journalists feature on a new range of stamps issued by the US Postal Service. The stamps were announce last year and have just appeared. The journalists featured are: Rubén Salazar, a TV and Los Angeles Times reporter killed when covering a 1970 war protest in East Los Angeles....more
Psyops on steroids
[video:youtube:wmRUXkWBUd0] "Pentagon infiltrate media with pro-war propaganda" Cripes. I'm shocked......more
Back in Afghanistan
Frontline Club member John D. McHugh is back in Afghanistan. As revealed on this blog a wee while back, he is working for The Guardian. He'll be producing six films, taking pictures, writing stories and updating his blog. To kick things off, the newspaper has published edited highlights from his...more
Let it out
CBS News foreign correspondent Kimberley Dozier, who recently participated in the Frontline Club event in New York, talks about how writing and discussing the more horrific experiences she has encountered as a war reporter has helped her cope, "If you don't talk to a therapist, talk to you wife, your...more
Judah Passow on Israel and the Palestinians
[video:brightcove:1522869105] Judah Passow, one of the leading UK based photojournalists, presents images from over 25 years covering the Middle East was at the Frontline Club. He discusses his pictures and how they demonstrate the complex human reality that exists on both sides of the divide....more
From Harare
Incase you haven't read this on the Zimbabaloola blog... This is definitely worth your time reading, For ten years ZANU PF loyalists have convinced themselves that the MDC and the democratic opposition was a creation of the British, the Americans, and the white farmers. Any black member of the MDC...more
Been in Afghanistan too long?
[video:youtube:Jev5YJWJv0o] Michael Tomberlin lists ten telltale warning signs you should watch out for if you think you've been in Afghanistan too long. The number one reason, he says, is when you find yourself doing something like the above video... But I quite liked reason number 9, You think a burqa...more
Alex Strick van Linschoten joins the Frontline
Alex Strick van Linschoten has been living and working in Afghanistan on and off for the last five years. He'll be writing a blog here at From the Frontline called A war reporter on the road. He starts in Kenya, but he'll also be blogging from Somalia, Chechnya and Iraq...more
Andrew Gilligan discusses journalism
[video:brightcove:1515865698] Andrew Gilligan, former BBC Radio 4 Defence and Diplomatic Correspondent, Journalist of the year 2008 and the man at the centre of the Hutton Inquiry and the "sexing up" scandal, told his side of the story at the Frontline Club last week. Click the video to watch the discussion....more
Jay Price and Dick Gordon talk war
News & Observer reporter Jay Price will be in conversation with WUNC's Dick Gordon tonight at UNC's School of Journalism and Mass Communication. It promises to be an informal chat between two reporters - one print, the latter radio - about their experiences reporting war zones. Gordon worked mostly...more
Sydney Saize on trial
Sydney Saize was arrested in the Zimbabwean town of Mutare in January 2006. He is charged under the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act for reporting at a school where two teachers were assaulted by pro-government supporters, According to the police, Saize violated Chapter 10.27 of the draconian...more
Colin Farrell on the fictitious frontline
A series of slides from the production set of Triage - a film about the psychological toll of reporting the Bosnian war on a photographer played by Colin Farrell. The film is due for release in 2009. More on the screenplay at Javno....more
Does the West love to hate China?’
[video:brightcove:1509865726] With recent events in Tibet raising questions about international support for the Olympics, a recent panel debate at the Frontline club discusses the possibility of boycott. The panellists are Shirong Chen from the BBC World Service, Tom Porteous of Human Rights Watch, The Guardian's Simon Tisdall and Liu Weimin...more
Why the white suit?
[video:youtube:3a12GtYsuwE] Frontline Club member Martin Bell is interviewed about Iraq and Afghanistan in Cherwell. The BBC war correspondent for thirty years reveals why he took to wearing the white suit that helped make his name in politics, ‘Because I’m superstitious. Keeps me alive in dangerous places. During the war in...more
Yuri Bagrov profiled
Former Chechen war reporter Yuri Bagrov is profiled in the New York Times today. Bagrov worked in Grozny disguising himself as a Russian soldier at one point so that he could report from the frontline in Grozny. His reports didn't go down well with Russian authorities and he was...more
“We are going to have to detain you for a little while, sirâ€
Writing in The Times Jonathan Clayton talks about his ordeal at the hands of Zimbabwean authorities as he tried to enter the country through the second city of Bulawayo posing as a golfing tourist. An old passport stamp aroused the suspicion of an immigration officer, [The Senior Immigration Officer...more
Kevin Sites sewing workshops
Kevin Sites is moving on from the Yahoo funded Hot Zone war reporting project he is most well known for. He is working on what sounds like a gimmicky show called People of the web. Sites believes war reporters need to focus on people and not combat, "The combat,...more
Richard Engel to NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent
Richard Engel will now serve as NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent. He previously worked as the channel's Senior Middle East Correspondent and Beirut Bureau Chief since May 2006. According to the press release, he was also "one of the only western journalists to cover the entire war in Iraq",...more
Digital war reporting
Three very interesting links come our way this week. First up, Kings of War leads us to the New Media and the Warfighter report from a Center for Strategic leadership workshop. The report concludes, New media as a means to achieve strategic information effects is an integral part of today’s...more
John D McHugh blogging from Afghanistan
Frontline Club member John D McHugh is heading back to Afghanistan. This will be the third April he's spent over there. The first almost killed him, the second went an awful lot smoother. He talked at length about his first trip, along with his photographs at the club in 2007....more
Seamus Murphy snapping the Taliban
[video:brightcove:1498976068] Seamus Murphy photographed the effects of the Taliban regime between 1994 and 2006. The "poet with a camera" recently talked about his work at the Frontline Club with Jocelyn Bain-Hogg. Well worth a watch....more
Stephen Bevan is back
Stephen Bevan, freelancer for the Telegraph and Barry Bearak from the New York Times left Zimbabwe yesterday. The duo were arrested some two weeks ago, however the law they were arrested under had been scrapped earlier in 2008. The charges didn't stick. Bevan is now back home in South...more
Pre-emptive war reporting
Syria and Israel are at war. Well... they're not exactly, but if conflict commences - the Iranian media will have it covered. In fact, they'll also have have it covered if it's Lebanon at war with Israel, according to the Iranian news agency 'A'sr Iran. 20 Iranian TV and...more
Fadel Shana buried in Gaza
Reuters cameraman Fadel Shana was buried today in Gaza City. The 23 year old was one of three killed yesterday near the Bureij refugee camp when an Israeli tank fired upon the car they were in, Reuters released the final video taken by Mr Shana in the seconds before...more
The world's worst road
... is between Chengdu to the city of Mianyang in China. At least according to Reuters men David Gray and Chris Buckley. The duo were following up on reports "that buildings had been damaged, thousands of riot police and soliders had been deployed, hundreds of local Tibetans had been...more
Richard Butler rescued
[video:youtube:fvMB0cOHW4s] Freelance photographer Richard Butler was rescued by Iraqi soldiers. He was working for CBS News when he was kidnapped on February 10. Iraqi soldiers found him by chance when they happened to be searching the house he was being kept in, "The Iraqi army stormed the house and overcame...more
Burt Glinn dies age 82
Cold war photographer Burt Glinn has died age 82. He's most well known for his work in Cuba during Castro's revolution. The Moscow Times remembers this highlight in his career on New Year's Eve in 1958 when the young photographer arrived in Havana looking for the revolution, When he...more
From the Frontline clubroom
The Frontline Club is profiled in The Independent newspaper today. Chris Green heads into the clubroom and rummages through the glass cabinets full of memorabilia left by the foreign correspondents and war reporters who make up the club's membership. Among the bits and pieces he finds is Vaughan Smith's...more
Dealing with trauma
Jackie Cameron writes about the trauma suffered by journalists reporting war in the Sunday Herald today. Cameron is a former journalist who retrained as an occupational psychologist when she decided to look into the effect of trauma on frontline journalists, As Dr Jo Rick, a leading trauma researcher based at...more
Pidgeons in Zimbabwe
Peter Cave in Johannesburg talks on Correspondents Report, an ABC Radio National programme, about how journalists get the story out of difficult spots like Zimbabwe. Pidgeons appear to be the key, Often the only way to get a story out of a difficult spot was to use a Pidgeon -...more
Best of Photojournalism awards 2008
The results in the judging for Best of Photojournalism 2008 are now in. The winners in the International news category can be found here. Cedric Gerbehaye, working for Agence VU, and publsihed in Newsweek won second prize for the image from Congo above. For the full list of winners...more
Bayeux award for war correspondents
The call for candidates for the Bayeux award for war correspondents is open until 6 June. The radio, photo, television and print reportages must have been made between 1 June 2007 and 31 June 2008. There is a €7,600 prize for each category. The panel is always chaired by an...more
The Foreign Correspondent in 2013
You've got until 2013. At the Media Re:Public conference in Los Angeles last month Solana Larsen threw out this provocative statement, In 2013, there will be no foreign correspondents link Or rather... not foreign correspondents as we have known them. We've discussed a possible future for them before - basically...more
The News Carers - are aid groups doing too much newsgathering?
[video:brightcove:1497932122] The Frontline Club's second sell out event in New York is now online. The focus is on aid groups role in the media and whether or not the media relies too much upon aid groups and NGOs to get the story out in words, pictures and video. John Owen,...more
Somali journalists win award
The National Union of Somali Journalists (NUOSJ) received an award from the fifth assembly of World Movement for Democracy (WMD) in Kiev, Ukraine today. In what is turning out to be something of a media awards week the NUSOJ were presented with the Democracy Courage Tribute on behalf of...more
Edward Lucas on the new cold war
[video:youtube:VmSu9Z9XihU] Edward Lucas talks with the BBC's Olexiy Solohubenko about Russia at the Frontline Club. Edward works for The Economist and is based in Eastern Europe and keeps an excellent blog here. He talks about Russia's increasing military muscle, its use of energy politics to pursue its international agenda and...more
Bob Woodruff wins Pearl Award
On the back of winning a Peabody last week, Bob Woodruff has just been announced the winner of the Daniel Pearl Award for Courage and Integrity in Journalism. Woodruff works for ABC and was seriously injured in a roadside bomb in Iraq in January, 2006, "We couldn't find a...more
John Burns talks Iraq
[video:youtube:cBkhFU11DWc] John Burns, Frontline Club founding member and the London bureau chief for New York Times, talks about the legacy of Iraq, his time in the country and the failings of the mainstream media in this ten minute interview on the American show Horizon. John talked at length about the...more
Photojournalist needed
I received a commercial request for a photojournalist. If you're interested, read on I am contacting you on behalf of Sony Ericsson, who would like to commission a photojournalist with global credibility to write tips on taking a good photo e.g. how to use light to your advantage etc, to...more
Journalism is a dangerous business
[video:youtube:gkrOK3sfWpE]...more
Foreign correspondent of the year 2008
The British Press Awards have just announced that Ghaith Abdul-Ahad has won Foreign Correspondent of the year for 2008. Ghaith works for the Guardian newsaper and is a regular at the Frontline Club having taken part in the first club event in New York. Frontline Club members have a...more
Social media news tracking
Georg Blume of Germany and Kristin Kupfer of Austria left from Lhasa train station in the early hours of Thursday March 20th. In so doing they became the last two foreign journalists to leave Tibet after being forced out by the Chinese authorities. "If they don't have anything to hide,...more
Ilyas Shurpayev murder suspect charged
Ilyas Shurpayev was murdered in his Moscow apartment on March 21. Today, authorities announced formal charges against the suspects arrested soon after the killing, The Tajik Prosecutor-General’s Office has announced formal charges against one of the detained accomplices in the murder of Russian television journalist Ilyas Shurpayev. He is Masrurdzhon...more
Pulitzer prize winners 2008
The Pulitzer prizes were announced last night. Among the winners are Steve Fainaru, from the Washington Post, who receives the prize for International Reporting for his reports on private security contractors operating in Iraq. Also, Reuters Bangkok senior snapper Adrees Latif wins the prize for Breaking news photography for...more
Macmillan bid for Iraq war story
Frontline club founding member Hala Jaber, who works for the Sunday Times, has auctioned the account of her time spent reporting in Iraq to the publishers Macmillan. She calls her account The Flying Carpet of Baghdad. Jaber was named foreign correspondent of the year at the British Press Awards in...more
Michael Kelly's widow reflects
Michael Kelly was the first American journalist to be killed covering the war in Iraq. He worked as a columnist for the Washington Post and the Atlantic Monthly. Last week marked the fifth anniversary of his death. His family reflect upon his death and their loss in his local...more
Colin Farrell to play war photographer
Irish actor Colin Farrell headed to Bosnia at the weekend to get a taste for how it felt to be a war reporter during the war during the early 1990s. Farrell will play a war photographer in a new film called Triage. The film is directed by the Bosnian...more
"A very poor choice of career"
War reporter Matt McAllester gave a talk to students at Stony Brook University in New York last week, McAllester said being a foreign correspondent meant never stopping. He said that when journalists are covering dangerous situations, they have to ask themselves, "Am I prepared to die for this?" "It is...more
Barry Bearak starts fifth day behind bars
New York Times reporter Barry Bearak and the un-named British journalist being held in Zimbabwe since last Thursday are now into their fifth day behind bars. They are being held even though Zimbabwe's Attorney General said at the weekend that there was no case against them. According to lawyers no-one...more
Kabul street named after journalist
Today the authorities in Kabul named a street in the Afghan capital after the local journalist Ajmal Naqshbandi. The 20 year old journalist was beheaded by the Taliban in April 2007. It is the first street named after a journalist killed in Afghanistan, While unveiling the plaque of the...more
Robert Fisk covering wars
[video:brightcove:1491695798] Robert Fisk, the Independent's Middle East correspondent, talks about his reporting career spanning three decades with the BBC's Jeremy Bowen, "We should be able to have feelings too. We're not machines that sit out in the Middle East..." link Be prepared for a Fiskian barrage from this recording of...more
Jon Swain remembers Dith Pran
Sunday Times war reporter Jon Swain remembers Dith Pran, the man who saved his life in Cambodia in 1975 and who died last week, I first met Pran in 1972. Although his loyalty was always to Schanberg, he was ready to give help and advice to me and all the...more
No case against Barry Bearak
The AFP reports that Zimbabwe's attorney general says there is no case against the New York Times journalist Barry Bearak and the un-named British journalist currently being held by the authorities in Zimbabwe, "The attorney general's office says there is no case to answer," lawyer Harrison Nkomo said. "Legally, this...more
Sir Geoffrey Cox dies age 97
Sir Geoffrey Cox, one of the greatest foreign correspondents of the 1930s, died in Britain this week. The New Zealander started out as a correspondent at 26 years old. He covered the Spanish civil war and the Nazi invasion of Austria for the News Chronicle and the Daily Express. He...more
Patrick Cockburn on Muqtada al-Sadr
[video:brightcove:1485316187] Latest video from the Frontline club events room is up. Award winning war correspondent Patrick Cockburn examines the role of Muqtada al-Sadr - the man who leads a movement in Iraq that opposed both Saddam Hussein and the US occupation. Moderated by the BBC's Caroline Hawley....more
Peabody Awards announced
The Peabody Awards were announced yesterday. Bob Woodruff is among the winners for his reporting from Iraq, "Severely injured by a roadside bomb in Iraq, Woodruff made wounded veterans and their struggle with recovery and red tape his special focus and served them well with his sensitive, dogged reporting," the...more
"No shame, no blame"
Writing on the Huffington Post Greg Mitchell, Editor of Editor & Publisher and author of the recent book "So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits and the President Failed on Iraq" goes over the media failings in the run up to Iraq and during the conflict, It's...more
Newseum receives Laos remains
According to Richard Pyle at the Associated Press a time capsule consisting of the remains of war photographers shot down over Laos during the Vietnam war will be preserved in a time capsule at the Newseum in Washington D.C. "museum devoted to the history and practice of journalism," Ten years...more
The Baghdad cab
[video:liveleak:979_1206832312] Steve Bent, a photographer at the Sunday Times, takes a leisurely cab ride through Baghdad, At that time of day, the journey of about four miles from our compound to Assassins’ Gate would take 30-40 minutes. And so the order came down to get us there in 10 minutes...more
How can I have been so stupid?
The Boston Globe talks to four war reporters about how it feels to face danger and the distinct possibility of death in the line of reporting wars. Here's LA Times reporter and present day Caribbean bureau chief Carol J. Williams on her experiences in the war zones of Bosnia, Kosovo,...more
Frontline bloggers talk
Live from Zimbabwe, live from Mexico and live from the Frontline club clubroom three of our From the frontline bloggers - Anita, Deborah and Kyle - talk about what they blog about on BBC Radio 5 Live's Pods and Blogs show. It's a great and varied listen. I recommend....more
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