Iraq
Only the rich report
Rageh Omaar recently returned to Iraq to catch up with people he has know over the last ten years from reporting there. Operating as a journalist there, he says, has never been harder and increasingly, it is only the rich media companies that can afford to send reporters, One of the least reported or acknowledged […]
Iraqi journalist shot dead
Xinhua reports that an Iraqi journalist was shot dead in central Baghdad today. “Qasim Abdul Hussein al-Eqabi, a journalist working for the local al-Muwatin newspaper was killed when unknown gunmen in two cars showered him with bullets near the National Theater in Karrada neighborhood,” said Jabbar Tarrad, the new chief of the Iraqi Journalists’ Union. […]
America’s media failed
CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, who recently relocated from the UK to the US, was recently interviewed by former TV man Marvin Kalb at the National Press Club. Amanpour said the profession “failed to do our duty†in the run up to the Iraq war. She also touched on the leading cause of death in journalism these […]
Viagra? Hash? Iraqi army marshal’s uniform?
[video:youtube:aGzGzyyDLNM] Your typical frontline trader offering your typical frontline goods to your typical soldier soldiering in your typical Middle East war zone. via The Observers.
The Habbaniya bookshelf
Tony Perry, a staffer with the LA Times and regular visitor to Iraq, takes us on a tour of a typical bookshelf found in American soldier’s barracks on a recent trip to Iraq, As I jump from base to base in Anbar province where the Marines are stationed, I always prowl the book collection. Some […]
Deborah Haynes gets upgraded
Times newspaper reporter Deborah Haynes blogs about the rigmarole associated with getting flights in Iraq as she seeks out the ‘Freedom Express’ on a mission to Mosul only to get upgraded to cockpit class, Travelling to northern Iraq for an embed is always a bit of a gamble because there are limited military flights and […]
Iraq war reporters talk five years on
Five years since the war in Iraq kicked off, NPR talk to four reporters who have covered the war over the last half decade. They are Anne Garrels, John F. Burns, Ted Koppel and Hoda Abdel-Hamid, Iraq has changed dramatically in the last five years for journalists covering the war. When foreign correspondents arrived in […]
Buying a sandwich in Baghdad
The New York Times run Baghdad Bureau is shaping up to be quite an interesting group blog. Today, Balen Y. Younis who is an Iraqi employee of The New York Times, writes about working for the newspaper, the reaction of friends when he told them he was going to work for the western media outlet […]
Oliver Poole in the Red Zone
Oliver Poole, a Frontline Club member we’ve blogged about previously, is pictured hard at work in a British base in Majar al-Kabir, 250 miles south-east of Baghdad. Oliver wrote Red Zone and the publisher Reportage Press has a Flickr photo group of snaps from and of its writers.
Baghdad bureau opens for blogging
The New York Times launches Baghdad Bureau this week. It’s “a blog supplementing the Reach of War coverage and focused on events inside Iraq” The New York Times Baghdad bureau is both home and office to between 7 and 10 western reporters, snappers and videographers along with a large Iraqi staff. The newspaper hopes the […]
The run up to Iraq
In this week’s Editor & Publisher podcast there is an interview with E&P Editor Greg Mitchell who recently published a book about the run up to war in Iraq and the role of the media – “So Wrong for So Long: How the The Press, the Pundits — and the President — Failed on Iraq”. […]
Photographer Preston-Smith on Iraq
Writer and photographer Joel Preston-Smith spent four months in Iraq in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He talks about his most recent book “Night of a Thousand Stars and Other Portraits of Iraq” with The Oregonian, How do you feel about these people treating you so gently when your country […]
Prominent Iraqi journalist shot
From the International Federation of Journalists, President of the Iraqi Union of Journalists in Baghdad, Shihab Al-Timimi, 75, is in hospital in critical but stable condition after his car was hit by a hail of bullets in a targeted attack following a meeting of the union leadership in the Al Wazeiriyah district in the centre […]
Phoning Fallujah
One of the Iraqi journalists working for McClatchy Newspapers and blogging at “Inside Iraq” is chuffed – to say the least – that after nearly five years of waiting, the phone lines from Baghdad to Fallujah are up and running again, It will sound silly, not worth it but it made me happy, smiling and […]
Muqtada al-Sadr and the Fall of Iraq
Thank God for journalists like Patrick Cockburn: diligent, intelligent, clear-eyed, brave, experienced. In Muqtada al Sadr and the Fall of Iraq, his third book on the country, he assembles a narrative out of the conflicting mash of self-serving accounts, propaganda and rumour over the last bloody five years. In doing so, he renders all of […]
Hans Jaap blogs from Baghdad
Hans Jaap is a Dutch journalist working for Radio Netherlands and he’s based in Baghdad. It’s not the threat of bombs that bother him in the Iraqi capital, it’s the fear of kidnapping. And for a moment the other day, he thought it was about to happen to him, My interpreter Ammar and I had […]
From the Mosul frontline
Salam Adil at Global Voices does an excellent job of rounding up the latest from the folks on the streets of Basra, Mosul and beyond. He dedicates a blog post “to the extraordinary bloggers of Mosul who are living on the front line of a war zone” Here are the words of Aunt Najma, In […]
Reporting Iraq like reporting on the Chinese government
Is reporting in Iraq really like reporting on the Chinese government? Well, according to some longtime journalists it is. Talking in the The Norman Transcript Oliver Schell, director of the Asia Society Center on U.S.-China Relations, describes it as it is, He described a trip to Baghdad to visit the Times’ bureau, complete with its […]
Journalist shot dead in Iraq
From the International Herald Tribune, yet more tidings of joy for journalism in the Middle East, An Iraqi journalist who disappeared after leaving his offices to buy some supplies was found shot to death Tuesday in central Baghdad, according to his organization. Hisham Michwit Hamdan, 27, went missing Sunday after he left the offices of […]
CBS staff kidnapped in Basra
The Guardian reports this morning that two employees of the US broadcaster CBS News have been kidnapped in Basra in southern Iraq. One is believed to be a British journalist, The UK journalist was seized by gunmen in Basra with his interpreter on Sunday, according to the Iraqi news agency Aswat al-Iraq (Voice of Iraq). […]
Jonathan Steele discusses Iraq
[video:brightcove:1411847678] Senior foreign correspondent and in-house columnist on international affairs for the Guardian, Jonathan Steele argues that the Coalition was not defeated in Iraq because of inadequate planning but for much more deep-rooted reasons. Jonathan was talking at the Frontline Club last Thursday, In his present role he travels frequently to the Middle East and […]
Baghdad rental
I’ve just finished listening to this and it’s superb. This American Life is an excellent weekly podcast and the episode that I just noticed in my subscription folder will no doubt have Frontline folk who’ve lived and worked in Iraq in stitches, Radio reporter Adam Davidson went to Iraq to report on the war. He […]
Ernesto Londono heads to Baghdad
Media Bistro picks up on a memo stating that Ernesto Londono becomes the newest member of the Foreign section of the Washington Post. As of next month he will be stationed in Baghdad where he’ll join Sudarsan Raghavan and correspondent Amit Paley. Londono succeeds Josh Partlow who is coming to the end of tour. Ernesto […]
It’s too dangerous
ABC News war correspondent, Terry McCarthy, talks about working in Iraq and how it is almost impossible to report from outside the green zone, “It’s a very dangerous war to cover and to go out and get those ‘feel good’ stories,” he said. “Being out among the people is extremely dangerous, so we have to […]
“I would never do it again”
Filmmaker Mike Shiley says he’d never do it again. The filmmaker, who quit his job and faked an ABC press pass before infiltrating Iraq, won awards for his documentary Inside Iraq: The Untold Stories. This week he spoke at a screening and Q&A at Temple University in Philadelphia. During the event a number of attendees […]
Alaa Abdul Kareem buried in Najaf
Alaa Abdul Kareem, who was killed on Tuesday when a bomb went off on the road between Balad and Samarra, was buried in Najaf yesterday. Kareem had been working for the TV station, Al Furat. Asad Khadhim, Chief Correspondent for the station, talked to the New York Times about his funeral, Mr. Kareem was married […]
Infotainment
Writing in The Long Term View, a publication of the Massachusetts School of Law Michelle Pulaski, professor of communications art at Pace University, Pleasantville, N.Y. drums out the now standard – “The media didn’t do its job in the run up to the Iraq war” – line. She describes the nightvision footage as having a […]
Missing what’s important
In an interview Salam Adil at the excellent blog aggregator, Global Voices, sums up the limitations of the mainstream media working in Iraq, Many times the mainstream media, by sheer virtue of being a foreign organisation, completely misses what is important. Blogs can fill in these gaps or provide insight into what is happening that […]
“Journalists are fair game”
Terry Anderson, the Associated Press war correspondent held hostage in Lebanon for six years during the 1980’s, speaks out about the present day safety situation for journalists, “[Iraq] is the most dangerous war that journalists have ever covered, by far,” Anderson said. “Eighty percent of the murders of journalists around the world are never investigated. […]
From doctor to journalist
An Iraqi doctor, now a student at Ball State University in the United States, is giving the world one of its first glimpses inside a Baghdad hospital. The Star Press says, Omer Salih Mahdi “puts a human face on the destruction caused by bombs that rip through Baghdad streets,” A year before he began filming […]