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The Islamic Republic of Iran turned 30 this week. Journalist and author Azadeh Moaveni has spent years living and reporting there. In her new book, Honeymoon in Tehran, she writes about the many difficulties journalists face in Iran. Chief among them: the government minder, who Moaveni calls "Mr.X" in her memoir.
This week, President Obama gave his first formal interview as commander in chief to Al Arabiya's Washington bureau chief, Hisham Melham, and the Muslim world watched. Melham says the massive outpouring of reaction to the interview surprised even him.
As the last of the Israeli Defense Forces left the Gaza Strip this week, we wondered how coverage by Al Jazeera might look through the eyes of a Westerner. Eric Calderwood, a Harvard graduate student living in Syria, wrote in the Boston Globe recently that, as an American, he was accustomed to “bloodless war journalism,” the kind you see on CNN. And so he was shocked by the unflinching, often gruesome footage he saw in Damascus.
In what the Foreign Press Association has called an “unprecedented restriction of press freedom,” the Israeli military has barred foreign correspondents from entering the Gaza Strip and thereby covering the war close-up. New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner says that in order to understand the current crackdown on media you have to think back to the summer of 2006.
The Palestinian point of view has long been a staple of Al Jazeera English’s coverage, as with its larger, Arabic-language parent. But there’s a wrinkle this time around. As one of the few news organizations inside of Gaza, AJE’s reporting is a major source of information for the entire world. Does this situation demand a different approach to reporting? Paul McKinney, executive producer for news at AJE, talks about his channel’s coverage of the current war.
Throughout this week’s flying shoe coverage, the comedic details of the debacle dominated headlines. But humor couldn’t dominate the essential moral. Bob ruminates on what the hurling of the footwear revealed about the extent of Iraqi discontent and of President Bush’s denial of the same.
Freelance photographer Zoriah Miller was disembedded from the Marine Corps this summer after taking photographs of dead US Marines and posting them to his blog. Miller says despite following every rule of embedded journalists, the Marine Corps leadership sought to ban him from being an embed for life.
New Yorker staff writer Philip Gourevitch and filmmaker Errol Morris spent two years investigating the motivations of the soldiers in the infamous Abu Ghraib prison photos for a documentary and book, both called Standard Operating Procedure. Gourevitch explains that the “bad apples” rationale doesn’t hold water.
