News
New Travelling Companion Needed
My travelling companion for the past four years is slowing down. Sluggish in the mornings and quick to tire in the afternoons, my Sony Vaio is not the machine it was. Not even a new battery has put a spring in its step. So it’s time to find a new laptop. I want a 13.3in […]
Michael Yon to embed with the Gurkhas later in the year?
Independent journalist Michael Yon, whose vivid dispatches from Frontline military embeds have proved popular both in the United States and Britain, has said that a return to covering British forces in Afghanistan later in the year is a strong possibility. A few weeks ago, on his Facebook fan page (one of those new news sources […]
Department of Defense switches default policy on social media to ‘open’
As of last Friday, all US servicemen have been able to update social networks like Twitter and Facebook from non-classified military network computers. The announcement by the Department of Defense is the first time a single policy has been used across all branches of the Armed Forces and effectively reverses a Marine Corps ban on […]
The Grisly Hunt by Julius Strauss
The life of a bear in British Columbia is cheap. Hunters, in collusion with the authorities, can kil a full-grown Grizzly for just $100. Julius Strauss reports from the Selkirk mountains on how he is fighting to stop the carnage We had just made it to the river, ducking under branches and scrambling around stumps, […]
Orange turns Blue by Askold Krushelnycky
Ukraine’s presidential elections, marred by corruption and vicious infighting, have produced a winer in viktor Yanukovych, Moscow ’s favoured candidate. as Putin looks to enlarge his empire, what does this victory mean for the region? Ukraine’s presidential election five years ago, which led to the Orange Revolution, seemed to signal that the country had finally […]
Lost boy found by Alan Philps
Russia is suffering an alarming drop in population yet it is throwing away potentially useful lives by in carcerating children with minor disabilitiesand conniving at baby trafficking. Alan Philps met one child who escaped. Newspaper headlines are always shouting that the Russian bear is eternally waking up, growling, or on the prowl. When Vladimir Putin, […]
Britain’s press ‘duped’ in run-up to Iraq war
Much of Britain’s press was taken in by cynical manipulation when they accepted the case for invasion of Iraq, journalists at the Frontline Club involved in reporting the war and its lead up claimed on Wednesday. Speaking during a discussion on the role of the media in the Iraq war, journalists who were involved in […]
Foreign Fishermen Still Plundering Somali Waters
Kenyan fisherman. Photo by David Axe. by DAVID AXE When the Somali government collapsed in 1991, so too did Somalia’s ability to police its waters and regulate foreign vessels. For corporate fishing fleets from Asia and Europe, that meant rich shark and tuna fisheries suddenly wide open for exploitation. And boy did they exploit. Tales […]
Richard Sambrook on the future of journalism and leaving the BBC
View in iTunes By Michael Haddon With a career spanning 30 years at the BBC, Richard Sambrook, director of the organisation’s global news division, has revealed how he once carried a resignation letter with him every day, in the expectation it would eventually have to be offered. That was in the torrid time after the Hutton Report into […]
No Borders Here – communication between Armenia and Azerbaijan
With the conflict in the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh still unresolved, journalists and civil society activists in Armenia have few opportunities to meet with their Azeri counterparts, and vice versa. But increasingly, blogs and social networks offer new possibilities for dialogue across a cease-fire line in place since 1994. Other online tools offer immediate audio […]
Ambush in Helmand
Here’s my second piece on Channel 4 News, which was broadcast on Thursday night. This piece also went out on PBS Newshour. They ran it with few changes but here is the link to that version as well…I think the subtiles look nicer. I will be working on longer director’s cut this weekend and will […]
Call for freelance entries for Amnesty International awards
Amnesty International has set up an entry fee sponsorship fund to support a limited number of submissions from freelance journalists and filmmakers for this year’s Amnesty International Media Awards. If you have worked on a story over the past 12 months that fits the awards criteria of "helping to shine a light upon injustice and […]
The Iraq war inquiry: time to call the media witnesses?
As an exercise in self-criticism the admissions by the New York Times and the Washington Post that their reporting on the build up to war in Iraq was "not as rigorous as it should have been" provoked a great deal of disscussion and got a mixed response: Modified Come Down at the New York TImes; […]
Al Shabab Rallies Troops for Mogadishu Defense
Al Shabab. AP photo. by DAVID AXE On Friday Sheikh Moqtar Robow Abumansor, a top military leader in Somali Islamic group Al Shabab, declared war against the U.S.- and U.N.-backed Transitional Federal Government and the African Union peacekeeping force in Mogadishu. This at a time when the TFG and peacekeepers are clearly planning for a […]
Tracking the Taliban: Vaughan Smith’s video report from Helmand Province
I have just returned from a second trip with the Grenadier Guards, who I visited in Helmand in 2007. They are now in Nadi Ali, in Helmand province, Afghanistan. I was there for a month, but my computer got waterlogged and so I haven’t posted anything to my blog from there so far. However, I am […]
Changing sides: BBC’s Richard Sambrook joins growing list of journalists who abandon the newsroom for PR
What is it that makes them switch? Higher salaries? Shorter hours? Whatever it is, there’s no shortage of senior BBC journalists making the move from the newsroom to the world of PR. The latest is Richard Sambrook, one of the highest-ranking journalists in the corporation, who is leaving the Beeb after 30 years to join […]
Digital Election 2010: social media’s important, but not a kingmaker yet
View in iTunes MPs, Westminster hacks and activists might be addicted to expressing themselves in 140 characters or less, but don’t expect this year’s general election to be decided on which party has the best social media strategy. But politicians and the media shouldn’t dismiss voters’ digital engagement either, according to a panel at a […]
Iraq: Assessing the media’s role in seven years of war
By Alison Larsen Seven years after the Iraq invasion, The Chilcot Inquiry has stirred up old tensions about the rights and wrongs of American and UK military intervention. But what role did the media play in reporting the conflict? An estimated 3,000 journalists reported on the Iraq war, including 800 embedded with allied forces, […]
Georgia-Russia War: The Movie Trailer
As shown on TV here, this is the trailer for veteran Hollywood action movie director Renny Harlin’s take on the Georgia-Russia war, starring Andy Garcia as Mikheil Saakashvili (with a rather peculiar accent). The feature film, which is due out later this year, has been described as an "anti-war" movie, but it was financed by […]
A Georgian Oppositionist’s Russian Gambit
Is a politician who signs a friendship pact with the people who recently invaded your country a traitor? That’s what the government here in Georgia has been saying after a former prime minister turned opposition party leader started hanging out in Moscow with Vladimir Putin and his cronies recently. On his latest visit to Russia […]
World Politics Review: Somali Forces Prepare Counter-Islamist Offensive
AMISOM peacekeepers. U.S. Army photo. by DAVID AXE Forces belonging to the U.S.- and U.N.-backed Transitional Federal Government (TFG) in Somalia have mobilized for a major offensive against Islamic militants who control much of southern and central Somalia. On Friday, a local journalist who spoke with World Politics Review reported seeing government forces, as […]
Chicago’s Favourite son by Charles Glass
What did Barack Obama learn in Chicago that propelled him to the White House? The Democratic Party there was a tough school, renowned for dirty politics. Can the education he had from The Machine help him bring Washington to heel? Illustration by Chris Riddell Until Barack Hussein Obama’s inauguration more than a year ago, […]
Mandela’s walk to freedom remembered: South Africa still suffering effects of Apartheid
By Gouri Sharma It could take South Africans another two generations to release themselves from the inferiority complex acquired during decades of Apartheid. Expert panelists at a Frontline Club event to mark 20 years since Nelson Mandela’s release from prison spoke of the psychlogical and social problems still affecting the nation, despite the hope and […]
Understanding the Taliban: Experts warn military force is misplaced, as ‘psychological’ war rages on
View in iTunes Watch the full event here. As the United States and allied forces prepare to deploy 15,000 troops in southern Afghanistan to battle Islamic insurgents, experts are warning that the problem isn’t one of physical might but of completely misunderstanding what the Taliban is. In the week that the number of British soliders […]
Afghanistan: “A solution is going to look somewhat ugly”
The important international voices have been ‘on message’ about Afghanistan recently in time for a new British-led NATO offensive in the area around Marjah in Helmand province. At the London Conference last month there was talk of "turning the tide"; NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen believes there is new momentum in Afghanistan; and US […]
Counterinsurgency blogged: A 30-day tour of Afghanistan
This looks like an interesting new blog which apparently kicks off today. US Tech Sergeants Ken Raimondi and Nathan Gallaghan are going to travel through five regional commands in Afghanistan blogging and vlogging along the way. Unsurprisingly, they think the story of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan isn’t being covered by the media: "We want to show […]
New Media training for Armenian and Azerbaijani journalists in Tbilisi, Georgia
Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, seems to be attracting me a lot these days and not least because it’s the only place in the South Caucasus where Armenians and Azerbaijanis can meet. With a peace deal between Armenia and Azerbaijan as elusive as ever, and with some still expecting a new war within the next five […]
“China’s Unnatural Disaster” censored in Chinese media
The film we’re so excited to have in our Frontline Russia collection, and that has already been screened in the Frontline Club in London, "China’s Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province" earlier this week was nominated for Oscar! A couple of days later a news came that the Chinese government continues to be quite […]
The future begins with ‘C’
Ok, here at Frontline we don’t know exactly what will happen in the unpredictable worlds of journalism and warfare over the coming years. But we can reveal how everyone will be describing the future. Military and media experts have gazed into their respective crystal balls (or maybe they’re sharing the same one due to respective […]
