Iraq
LIVE stream tonight: Iraq – A Fragile Sovereignty
You can now what the event here. The future of Iraq is up for debate tonight at the Frontline Club with a great panel. If you can’t make it to the club in Paddington, please join in online on the Frontline Club livestream channel where you can register to chat and join in the debate. […]
Escape from Iran
Ahmed Batebi who fled from Iran after eight years in prison tells his story in a short video on the New York Times. Using footage he shot on a small camera Batebi tells the story of his journey froma activist to refugee as he slipped over the border into northern Iraq with the help of […]
Zoriah Miller says he was censored
Democracy Nation talk to Zoriah Miller, the American photojournalist we previously blogged about here and here, who was booted out of Iraq last week. He describes the aftermath of the attack he photographed that led to the US Army immediately disembedding him, I immediately began to take as many pictures as I possibly could, which […]
A fixer goes to America
Jeremy Gerard provides an update on the fixer known only as Ahmed Ali. A few months ago things weren’t looking good for Ali and his new life in America. However, things are picking up for the man who helped Oliver Poole work as a journalist in Iraq and who features in his Red Zone book, […]
One year on: Reuters still waiting for US Army video
The U.S. military said on Friday it was still processing a request by Reuters for video footage from U.S. helicopters and other materials relating to the killing of two Iraqi staff in Baghdad a year ago. Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen, 22, and driver Saeed Chmagh, 40, were killed in a U.S. helicopter air strike in […]
Warren Zinn on the suicide of Joseph Dwyer
Photographer Warren Zinn reacts to the news of Joseph Dwyer’s death. Dwyer was a US Army medic in the Iraq when Zinn took the photograph above. He writes about his reaction to the news in the Washington Post, For years, I’d proudly displayed the front page of USA Today featuring the photo. It was a […]
Darfur and the media attention deficit
Ethan Zuckerman asks some great questions about Darfur and media attention on his blog. I dropped a comment, but it might be worth pulling together a few threads here. The general feeling is that “attention paid to Darfur is unprecedented” – but was it? Is it? If we feed a few keywords through Silobreaker’s Media […]
Arianna Huffington (continued): Surge in Iraq has failed
After her visit to the BBC, when she criticised media coverage of the war in Iraq, Arianna Huffington has decided to write a blog post explaining why she thinks the military surge in Iraq isn’t working: “…while McCain and the Republicans may have been able to win the PR war among the American media, there […]
15 months of reporting
[video:youtube:N3_ZKBwv3V0] Mike Boettcher, ex-CNN, NBC, Peabody award winning journalist, is heading to Iraq and Afghanistan to report on the soldier’s stories. He’ll be out there for 15 months and will file all his work to the web on a site called NoIgnoring. He says he’ll make all the material free for news networks to use […]
Blogger booted out of Iraq
Zoriah Miller, a photojournalist and blogger whom we’ve featured here previously, has been ordered to leave Iraq for taking photos. Well, one photo in particular appears to have rankled the American military powers that be. The image, of a dead American soldier lying on his back his face unrecognisable due to a bomb blast, was […]
Milblogger bites the dust for writing ‘too much unfiltered truth’
LT G, author of Kaboom: A Soldier’s War Journal, says he will have to stop updating his milblog with immediate effect. In a post entitled ‘Tactical Pause‘, LT G explains that although he ‘committed no OPSEC violations’, ‘extenuating circumstances’ meant a post he wrote on 28 May did not go through the ‘normal vetting channels’. […]
Surprise find in Baghdad
Somewhat startling news that Lee Abrams, chief innovation officer at the Tribune company, is surprised to find the Tribune group – which includes some 11 newspapers and various broadcast outlets – has a reporter in Iraq for the LA Times. In an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic he wonders why the paper doesn’t […]
War reporting is too expensive
[video:youtube:CT-Hq117w8s] Following on from Lara Logan’s broadside on the American media coverage of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars – the CBS Chief Foreign Correspondent said she would “blow her brains out” if she had to watch what passed for news in the US – The New York Times follows up with a round up of […]
A view on the security situation in Baghdad
I thought I’d take Arianna Huffington’s advice and point you to someone claiming to be giving the facts on the ground in Iraq. Dr Mohammed blogs at Last of Iraqis. He’s been blogging about his life as a dentist in the Iraqi capital for some time now and has contributed to the BBC’s iPM radio […]
Amnesty International Media Awards 2008
Deborah Haynes, Baghdad based foreign correspondent for The Times, was announced the winner of the National Newspaper reporting award at the Amnesty International Media Awards last night. Deborah is a regular on this blog with highlights from her Inside Iraq blog. The Press Gazette reports that among the winners was one posthumous award, Iraqi journalist […]
Are we just numb?
[video:youtube:zh2A_SYuhls] That’s the question Jon Stewart, presenter of the Daily Show, asked Lara Logan, chief correspondent for CBS News, on the show he presents last night, I mean, there were 51 people killed today in a Shia neighborhood in Iraq. Are we just numb? Have we lost our humanity with this entire situation? Yeah, we […]
From Broadway to Baghdad
Campbell Robertson, New York Times Broadway gossip columnist, is heading to Iraq – “once the Tony’s are over” – for the United States leading broadsheet. Explaining the decision James Glanz, Baghdad Bureau Chief, says the paper could do with some fresh ideas, “Look, he’s an untraditional war correspondent the way a lot of us are,†[…]
Live tonight: Philip Gourevitch on Iraq
Download this episode View in iTunes You can now view the event here. Philip Gourevitch, author, journalist and longtime staff writer of the New Yorker will be talking about Iraq, Abu Ghraib and his most recent book, Standard Operating Procedure, with the journalist Nick Fielding at the Frontline Club tonight. More details on the event […]
Interview with Lara Marlowe
Lara Marlowe, Irish Times foreign correspondent, has reported from Algeria, Serbia, Iraq and the wider Middle East. She talks to the Media Channel about how she became a foreign correspondent and about that dreaded 21st century term “embedding”, The only embedded journalists I came across were in the accreditation service inside the Green Zone. There […]
Reuters killing justified
The Press Gazette reports that a US government inquiry into the killing of Reuters soundman Waleed Khaled and the wounding of cameraman Haider Kadhem in Iraq 2005 was justified, The Office of the Inspector General of the US Department of Defense report into the killing of soundman Waleed Khaled and the wounding of cameraman Haider […]
Iraqi TV reporter killed
A Iraqi TV reporter in the northern city of Mosul has been shot and killed according to reports just coming in from AP, An Iraqi policeman says gunmen emerged from a car Tuesday and opened fire on Muhieddin Abdul-Hamid near his apartment in eastern Mosul. An official with Iraqiya state TV says the 50-year-old journalist […]
Flying into Baghdad
New York Times photographer Michael Kamber describes his most recent flight into Baghdad, Circling over Baghdad, the pilot corkscrews down to avoid ground fire. Landing here, your imagination does the work, scanning the ground for the flash of something being launched, as if you could do anything anyway. But still, it’s good to worry. link
Zoriah in the red zone
Latest shots from Zoriah inside the red zone in Baghdad are on Flickr. Click the image above to watch the slideshow. His blog is here.
Reporting the red zone
The New York Observer begins a week of reports, called Reporting the Red Zone, focussing on the lives of journalists stationed in Baghdad, “It’s the oft-stated phrase that truth is the first casualty of war,†said Michael Ware, CNN’s Baghdad correspondent, on the telephone from Iraq. “In this war, as in every other conflict, everybody […]
Know your DBIEDs from your HBIEDs
Deborah Haynes, Baghdad Correspondent for The Times, navigates the world of military acronymns, As a journalist, I spend a fair amount of time asking someone to translate into real English (or at least real American English) what is being said when on an embed with soldiers. link Even so, Haynes does a fine job of […]
Refugee status for Iraqi journalists
The Iraqi staff of McClatchy Newspapers in the Baghdad bureau ponder the news that Iraqis working for US media organisations will be considered for a refugee programme, But one question kept coming up again and again. “How will we be treated there?” “Do they discriminate against Muslims?” “Will my wife have a hard time because […]
From Baghdad to Brixton
Colin Freeman, the Daily Telegraph’s chief foreign correspondent, compares living and working in Baghdad to life back on the streets of London, Britain’s streets may be cleaner than those in war zones, but in the past couple of years they have acquired something of a similar aura of random violence: the surge of teenage knife […]
Reporting restrictions
David Carr writes in the New York Times about The Wars We Choose To Ignore. With war coverage shrinking to a mere drip – “3% of all American print and broadcast news as of last week” – down from 25% last September according to Project for Excellence in Journalism’s News Coverage Index, Carr highlights some […]
Bilal Hussein wins journalism prize
Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein, who spent more than two years in U.S. military custody in Iraq on suspicion of being a security threat, was awarded a journalism prize by the Miguel Gil Moreno Foundation on Thursday. link
Chronology of journalists killed in Iraq
As an Iraqi cameraman was shot dead by U.S. troops as he walked home on Thursday. Reuters has put together a recent chronology of journalists killed in Iraq. Reporters Without Borders has called the Iraq war the deadliest conflict for journalists since World War Two, with 213 journalists and support workers killed since 2003. link