Author: |Posted: 9:00 am on 10/09/09
Category: Snowblog
“We’re entitled to the protection of the First Amendment – no more.”
So read my angry overnight text from an old New York Times friend with whom I survived reporting the civil war in El Salvador in the early nineteen eighties.
We can be scandalised that the journalistic activities of Stephen Farrell, working in Afghanistan for the same newspaper, cost the lives of his translator and a British soldier who went in to rescue him, and others. But it’s not so simple. read more
Author: |Posted: 4:22 pm on 03/09/09
Category: Snowblog
So Terry Wogan considers newscasters as “self-important” and the job a “piece of cake“.
He’s quite right.. or nearly right. It’s a piece of cake so long as you can absent yourself from any involvement in generating the material that you are reading. The moment you combine newsreading with actual journalism, going after stories, trying to find out stuff, and the rest, it becomes much harder. read more
Author: |Posted: 10:43 am on 28/05/09
Category: World News Blog
LAHORE, PAKISTAN – One of the joys of working in Pakistan is that people here love the media. There are dozens of Pakistani newspapers and TV channels and every other Pakistani, it seems, is – or thinks he is – a journalist.
Of course the government – like most governments – wants to restrict or control coverage, but their own people can’t help themselves. They like us.
In a refugee camp in North West Frontier Province, two policemen came up and told us we had to report to the major. Oh no, I thought, we’re in trouble. read more
Author: |Posted: 4:18 pm on 23/03/09
Category: Snowblog
A thought ahead of the opening of The Boat That Rocked, the movie about the pirate radio stations and Radio Caroline in particular.
If it hadn’t been for the closing down of these stations and the change in the law that allowed legal commercial radio stations, I might very well never be where I am today.
Author: |Posted: 11:44 am on 23/03/09
Category: Snowblog
I’m very struck by the response to the condom debate sparked by our interview following the Pope’s comments last week. More than 50 comments, and an interesting spread.
I have I suppose what the Catholic church would call a “confession” to make. I did not handle it well. One must be honest about these things.
Author: |Posted: 3:55 pm on 12/03/09
Category: Snowblog
I blogged earlier this week about the possibility that our disgraced bank bosses had signed “gagging orders” as part of their severance deals, stopping them from talking about what happened to the banks on their watch (earlier this week we asked RBS and Lloyds TSB to confirm or deny this, but they have yet to do so).
Author: |Posted: 11:36 am on 10/03/09
Category: Snowblog
“How do you pronounce ‘principum amicias’? Is it hard ‘c’, soft ‘c’, or a hard ‘ch’?” my friend asked. She was working on the story of the newly discovered Shakespeare portrait.
I think I was right in suggesting a hard “c”. But before I knew it, we were debating the value of Latin – four or five of us. We had all hated learning it, but basked in what it had done for us. We shared accounts of what it had done for our own literacy and understandings of language construction.
Author: |Posted: 3:51 pm on 09/03/09
Category: Snowblog
We’ve had an actor in here. He’s got a part in which he plays a whiz British news producer who is sent to a chaotic American newsroom to sort it out.
I told him he should watch Broadcast News, still after all these years the best film ever made about our trade – even if a little overstated.
Author: |Posted: 5:15 pm on 06/03/09
Category: World News Blog
More thoughts on female journalists on the frontline, this time from the activist and writer Gloria Steinem. This is from a recent interview in Russia Today:
Q: Now, the conference that you’re going to be key speaker of here in Russia is called “Building bridges across conflicts: the role of women journalists”. How can women build bridges differently from men in conflicts in journalism?
Author: |Posted: 11:57 am on 06/03/09
Category: World News Blog
Last night I chaired a panel discussion hosted by Amnesty International called “Women on the Frontline“. The idea was to get together women journalists who cover conflict to talk about their experiences and thoughts.
My three colleagues – Marie Colvin, Ramita Navai and Christine Toomey – all thought that being a woman could only be advantage. We can cover all the same stories as male reporters, but we also get special access and insight into how war affects women. read more
