Media: AP - Still Covering the World

by Sherry Ricchiardi (AJR, 2007/12-2008/1)

As U.S. news organizations have backed away from foreign news coverage, the Associated Press’ international report has become increasingly vital.

The rest of the story: The American Journalism Review

The Job: News deaths hit an all-time high

by Roy Greenslade (The Guardian, 2007-11-29)

At least 171 journalists and other news media staff have died as a result of their work around the world so far this year, making 2007 the bloodiest year on record for the industry.

With more than a month still to go before the end of the year, the all-time high of 168 deaths recorded in 2006 was exceeded on Tuesday when at least three editorial staff were killed in Sri Lanka during a military air strike on a radio station.

"This horrible statistic should be regarded as a low point in the safety and welfare of the media profession. We need better protection for media workers worldwide," said the president of the International News Safety Institute (INSI), Chris Cramer.

According to INSI's casualty records, the death toll between January 1 and November 28 is comprised of 142 journalists and 29 support staff, such as drivers, translators and news technicians, in 35 countries.

The great majority, 121, were apparently murdered after being targeted because of their jobs. Fifteen died in crossfire or other random attacks, 34 were killed in road or air accidents while the circumstances of one death remain unclear.

The most murderous country again was Iraq, where 64 died, taking the total news media toll since the start of the war to at least 235. Others were Sri Lanka (six murders), Afghanistan, Mexico, India and Philippines (five each) and Haiti, Pakistan and Somalia (four each).

The rest of the story: The Guardian

Iraq: AP Chief Slams Case Against Iraqi Photographer

by Lily Hindy (AP, 2007-11-24)

The U.S. military's plan to seek a criminal case against an Associated Press photographer in Iraq without disclosing the charges or evidence against him makes a mockery of American democratic principles, AP President and CEO Tom Curley said Saturday.

"This is a poor example—and not the first of its kind—of the way our government honors the democratic principles and values it says it wants to share with the Iraqi people," Curley said in a column in The Washington Post.

The U.S. military notified the AP last weekend that it intended to submit a complaint against Bilal Hussein that would bring the case into the Iraqi justice system as early as Nov. 29....

"At long last, prize-winning Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein may get his day in court....We believe Bilal's crime was taking photographs the U.S. government did not want its citizens to see. That he was part of a team of AP photographers who had just won a Pulitzer Prize for work in Iraq may have made Bilal even more of a marked man."

The rest of the story: Breitbart.com

War on Terror: Gitmo JAG attacks legal process

Have you noticed how often we must rely on the BBC, The Guardian, The Economist, The Independent UK, foreign language papers, and, domestically, the McClatchy chain to do the reporting not being done by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post and the "news" magazines, let alone the networks and CNN? As of this posting, this story from the Independent's Sunday edition had been picked up by dozens of blogs and a few alternative media sites, but not by a single major American media outlet. - JG

Guantanamo military lawyer breaks ranks to condemn 'unconscionable' detention

by Leonard Doyle in Washington (The Independent UK, 2007-1027)

An American military lawyer and veteran of dozens of secret Guantanamo tribunals has made a devastating attack on the legal process for determining whether Guantanamo prisoners are "enemy combatants".

The whistleblower, an army major inside the military court system which the United States has established at Guantanamo Bay, has described the detention of one prisoner, a hospital administrator from Sudan, as "unconscionable".

His critique will be the centrepiece of a hearing on 5 December before the US Supreme Court when another attempt is made to shut the prison down. So nervous is the Bush administration of the latest attack – and another Supreme Court ruling against it – that it is preparing a whole new system of military courts to deal with those still imprisoned.

The rest of the story: The Independent UK

Official Lies: State Department Coverup on Blackwater Revealed

Officials balked on '05 Blackwater inquiry

State Department e-mails obtained by ABC News discuss how to deflect a Times reporter's questions about a civilian shooting death.

by T. Christian Miller (Los Angeles Times, 2007-19-26)

Even as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice defended her department's oversight of private security contractors, new evidence surfaced Thursday that the U.S. sought to conceal details of Blackwater shootings of Iraqi civilians more than two years ago.

In one instance, internal e-mails show that State Department officials tried to deflect a 2005 Los Angeles Times inquiry into an alleged killing of an Iraqi civilian by Blackwater guards.

"Give [the Los Angeles Times] what we can and then dump the rest on Blackwater," one State Department official wrote to another in the e-mails, which were obtained by ABC News. "We can't win this one."

One department official taking part in a chain of e-mails noted that the "findings of the investigation are to remain off-limits to the reporter." Another recommended that there be no mention of the existence of a criminal investigation since such a reference would "raise questions and issues."

The rest of the story: The Los Angeles Times

Essay: Journalism and its discontents

Ninety years after Walter Lippmann first railed against the complicity of the media in wartime propaganda, we're back at ground zero.

by Sidney Blumenthal (Salon, 2007-10-25)

Walter Lippmann (1889-1974) was the most influential American journalist of the 20th century. Born into one of the German-Jewish "Our Crowd" families of New York City, he began his career as a cub reporter for Lincoln Steffens, the crusading investigative journalist, then became one of the original editors of the New Republic, and was recruited to write speeches for President Woodrow Wilson and help formulate his plan to make the world "safe for democracy," the Fourteen Points. In the 1920s, Lippmann became editorial director of the New York World, then a major daily newspaper with a Democratic orientation. When it folded, the New York Herald Tribune offered him a column, which, with the Washington Post, served as his journalistic base for almost 50 years.

Lippmann wrote books on philosophy, politics, foreign policy and economics. In one of them, "The Cold War," he early defined the struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union while offering penetrating criticism of U.S. policy as a "strategic monstrosity" that would lead to "recruiting, subsidizing and supporting a heterogeneous array of satellites, clients, dependents and puppets," inevitably forcing poor choices of having to either "disown our puppets, which would be tantamount to appeasement and defeat and the loss of face," or else back them "at an incalculable cost on an unintended, unforeseen and perhaps undesirable issue." Lippmann's prophetic warning was realized in the Vietnam War, which he opposed at considerable cost to his personal and political relationships. (Anyone interested in Lippmann, or American politics, should read Ronald Steel's magisterial biography, "Walter Lippmann and the American Century.")

Among his varied roles, Lippmann was the original and most prescient analyst of the modern media. His disillusioning experience in World War I prompted the first of three books on the subject, "Liberty and the News," followed in rapid succession by "Public Opinion" and "The Phantom Public." In them Lippmann deconstructed the distortions and lies of government propaganda eagerly transmitted by a jingoist press corps, the "manufacture of consent" and the creation of "stereotypes" projected as false reality.

-- from the afterword to a new edition of Walter Lippman's "Liberty and the News" to be reissued this month by Princeton University Press.

The rest of the story: Salon

Iraq: As War Dragged On, Coverage Tone Weighed Heavily on Anchors (The Washington Post)

by Howard Kurtz (The Washington Post, 2007-10-08)

Charlie Gibson is a product of the Vietnam War era. When he was a television reporter in Lynchburg, Va., he had driven to Washington on weekends to march in antiwar demonstrations. And he had lost friends in that jungle war.

Now Gibson had friends whose sons were dying in Iraq. His thoughts kept returning to one central question: When you commit kids to war, what are they fighting for? What was the mission in Iraq? How could a family say that the war was worth little Johnny's well-being?

The ABC anchor was obsessed with this point. If you were president, and you decided to go to war, was there a calculus in your mind, that the goal was worth so many American lives? After all, your generals would tell you that X number were likely to die. What was the acceptable trade-off? Gibson's threshold would be one: Was the war worth one life?

As the U.S. occupation of Iraq stretched into its fourth bloody year, the media coverage was turning increasingly negative, and the three evening news anchors constantly agonized over how to deal with the conflict.

Their newscasts had become a nightly tableau of death and destruction, and whether that was an accurate picture of Iraq had become a matter of fierce political debate. Certainly the constant plague of suicide bombs, explosive devices, sniper fire and, occasionally, the massacre of large numbers of civilians played into television's need for dramatic events and arresting visuals. Certainly, by 2006 it was easier for the anchors and correspondents to offer a skeptical vision of the war, now that a majority of the country disapproved of the conflict, than in the heady days after the toppling of Saddam Hussein seemed to strike a blow for democracy in the Middle East. By training their powerful spotlight on the chaos gripping Iraq, the anchors were arguably contributing to the political downfall of a president who had seemed to be riding high when he won his second term.

Through the routine decisions of daily journalism -- how prominently to play a story, what pictures to use, what voices to include -- the newscasts were sending an unmistakable message. And the message was that George W. Bush's war was a debacle. Administration officials regularly complained about the coverage as unduly negative, but to little avail. Other news organizations chronicled the deteriorating situation as well, but with a combined 25 million viewers, the evening newscasts had the biggest megaphone.

The rest of the story: The Washington Post

This article is adapted from the book "Reality Show: Inside the Last Great Television News War" by Howard Kurtz, Free Press, New York, ©2007.

First Amendment: ABC Journalist Ordered To Disclose Sources

By Joseph Goldstein (The New York Sun, 2007-09-28)

A federal judge in New York has ordered a journalist at ABC News, Brian Ross, to disclose the identities of the government sources he relied upon when reporting about the anthrax attacks of 2001.

Mr. Ross is now the sixth reporter to have been ordered to give up sources to assist with a civil lawsuit brought by a former Army scientist, Steven Hatfill, whom the government named as a "person of interest" in the investigation into the deadly anthrax mailings. Mr. Hatfill, who was never charged with the mailings, is suing the federal government for invading his privacy.

The rest of the story: The New York Sun

Beat the Press: Smirking Ahmadinejad Suckers U.S. Media

Politicians, pundits, journalists, diplomats, talk-show bookers, historians and social scientists all paid rapt attention to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to the U.S. this week. I suspect some shrewd crisis-management experts were watching the proceedings, too.

The despot gave an enlightening lesson in how to manage the U.S. media: Be vague. Obfuscate. Smile mindlessly -- a lot. Be friendly. Nod wisely instead of speaking foolishly. Say absolutely nothing threatening or menacing. Turn their image of you on its head. And, for God's sake, man, say nothing of substance.

Maybe, instead, the lesson was how to sucker the U.S. media. The man played us for suckers -- just like any PR-hungry celebrity who spins reporters and editors. The bottom line was that he knew more about how the American media works than they knew about him.

The rest of the story: MarketWatch
Related commentary: President Bush Could Never Handle Columbia University Crowd

Foreign Intelligence: Iraqi TV reflects sectarian strife

Most channels linked to partisan power blocs

By Bryan Pearson (Variety, 2007-09-21)

BAGHDAD -- With more than 30 satellite and terrestrial channels operating in Iraq, a far cry from the two that existed under Saddam Hussein's rigid rule, the television industry should by now be celebrating its new-found freedom.

Instead, it has turned inward, becoming a mish-mash of sectarianized channels linked directly or loosely with partisan power blocs and reflecting the country's highly fractured political reality.

While nine or 10 core satellite channels and as many regional stations have survived the turmoil of the past four years, others have started up or closed down at irregular intervals mainly for commercial reasons.

An unfortunate few have been shut down by the Shiite-led government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.

Tellingly, the two most-watched channels, as rated by research group Ipsos-Stat, have been booted out of the country -- Saudi newscaster Al-Arabiya for a while, and Dubai-based Al-Sharqiya permanently.

Both offended Maliki's government. Al-Arabiya was accused of attempting to stoke sectarian tensions in the country with its gory coverage of the ongoing Iraqi carnage -- charges channel execs denied -- while Al-Sharqiya served up political parody bound to offend.

The end for the channel came after one Al-Sharqiya presenter appeared on air shortly after the execution of Saddam Hussein wearing black as a sign of mourning.

The shutting of its offices in Baghdad had little effect, however, and despite what many perceive as a pro-Sunni bias it remains highly popular in Iraq with its mix of skeins and satirical laffers that poke fun at life in the troubled country.

But while Al-Sharqiya is at least discreet about the line it toes, other channels are more blatant about their political proclivities.

The rest of the story: Variety

Documentary filmmaker Michael Moore criticizes CNN...on CNN

Sicko director Michael Moore blasts CNN host Wolf Blitzer and resident medical commentator Dr. Sanjay Gupta for what Moore regards as the distorted coverage on the network of both the war in Iraq and the issue of health care (at the end of the segment, watch CNN try to put Moore in place before the next segment by contextualizing him with an irrelevant reference to Venezuela prez Hugo Chavez).

- Moore and Blitzer:
<http://youtube.com/watch?v=6TR1SG8WDbU>

- Sanjay Gupta's 'Sicko Reality Check':
<http://www.crooksandliars.com/>

- Moore's rebuttal to the 'Sicko Reality Check':
<http://www.michaelmoore.com/>

Interest growing in plight of journalist held at Gitmo

Why have detainees been held at Guantánamo for six years without a mechanism to fairly determine whether they belong there?

From Prisoner 345: What happened to Al Jazeera’s Sami al-Haj in the July/August 2007 edition of the Columbia Journalism Review:

"Despite the novelty of [Sami] al-Haj’s status as the only journalist inside Guantánamo, it was a long time before he attracted much media attention. At first, even Al Jazeera was reluctant to cover his story. 'Up until around 2003, the air was very tense. You didn’t really want to investigate it too much,' said Ahmad Ibrahim, an Al Jazeera producer who has researched al-Haj’s case. 'At least to a lot of people around the world, holding people was probably justifiable due to the enormity of 9/11. And in the Arab world, the situation at Guantánamo was difficult to comprehend or believe, even that any kind of torture would be perpetrated by the U.S. A lot of people didn’t comprehend what Guantánamo stood for, and the legal arguments that were used to justify it.' In 2005, Ibrahim invited Stafford Smith to Al Jazeera’s headquarters in Doha. 'That’s when the big interest in Sami and his plight started.'

"Since then, al-Haj has become a cause célèbre in the Arab world. Ibrahim made a forty-five-minute documentary about him, Prisoner 345, and Al Jazeera regularly reports on his case. Al-Haj has also been featured in several stories in the British press. But despite repeated efforts by Ibrahim and Stafford Smith, there was until very recently almost no coverage of al-Haj in the U.S., apart from a New York Times column last October by Nicholas Kristof. Al Jazeera 'is still perceived in a very negative way' in the U.S., said Joel Campagna of the Committee to Protect Journalists. 'I think that has made people pause when looking at this case.'

"But while some journalists may distrust Al Jazeera, or may have believed Donald Rumsfeld’s discredited claim that the inmates represented the 'worst of the worst,' others may have avoided writing about detainees like al-Haj because of a more mundane bias: the simple difficulty of reporting about Guantánamo. It’s often been noted that the lopsided legal process fashioned by the Bush administration makes it virtually impossible for detainees to defend themselves. A lesser noticed consequence is that the withholding of evidence makes it impossible for journalists to write a conventionally 'balanced' story about individual detainees—and hence, they are less likely to write about them at all. While researching this piece, for instance, I’ve had plenty of access to al-Haj’s lawyer and to Al Jazeera, but none to the Department of Defense or al-Haj himself. This imbalance is uncomfortable, but to be deterred by it would be to miss the point. The central question underlying the case of al-Haj and the other detainees is not their guilt or innocence, but why they have been held at Guantánamo for six years without a mechanism to fairly determine whether they belong there."

The rest of the story: The Columbia Journalism Review

Media: BBC plans foreign audience push

By Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson and Ben Fenton (Financial Times; 2007-6-17)

LONDON — The BBC is planning a more aggressive push for international audiences and advertising revenue with an overhaul of its overseas television lineup aimed at creating channels that can be "No. 1 or No. 2" in their markets, senior executives said.

Darren Childs, managing director of global channels for BBC Worldwide, the state-funded broadcaster's commercial arm, acknowledged that channels such as BBC America and BBC Prime had suffered from "a lack of focus and a scatter-gun strategy."

A multimillion-pound investment plan will see the BBC Prime general entertainment channel replaced with a series of thematic channels such as BBC Entertainment, BBC Lifestyle and CBeebies, a children's channel, and will include new U.S.-focused news programs for BBC America.

"I think with George W. Bush's approval rating at 29%, having a news broadcast with a neutral, British, BBC approach is well-timed," said Garth Ancier, president of BBC America.

The rest of the story: The Financial Times