Journalist Killings in Iraq Condemned

Journalist Killings in Iraq Condemned
By VIJAY JOSHI , 08.03.2006, 05:54 AM

Two international media watchdogs have condemned the slayings of two journalists in Iraq that one of the groups said raised to at least 100 the number of media members killed since the U.S. invasion in March 2003.

"No armed conflict since the Second World War has been so deadly for the press," Reporters Without Borders, a French press freedom organization, said in a statement Wednesday. The group described the high death toll as "appalling."

Adil al-Mansuri, an Iraqi correspondent for the Iranian government-run Al-Alam television station, was shot as he was returning to his western Baghdad home Monday.

Reporters Without Borders said 100 journalists and media assistants are known to have been killed in Iraq since 2003. It said two are missing and three others are currently held hostage.
(snip/...)

http://www.forbes.com/entrepreneurs/entremgmt/feeds/ap/2006/08/03/ap2924413.html

Home from Iraq
Journalist urges Americans to search for truth, freedom'

"We spent 10 months in Iraq, working on a story, understanding who the people are who are fighting, why they fight, what their fundamental beliefs are, when they started, what kinds of backgrounds they come from, what education, jobs they have. Were they former military, are they Iraqi or foreign? Are they part of al-Qaida? What we came up with is a story in itself, and one that Vanity Fair ran in July 2004 with my text and pictures. shot a documentary film that is still waiting to find a home. But the basic point for this discussion is that we both thought it was really journalistically important to understand who it was who was resisting the presence of the foreign troops. If you didn't understand that, how could you report what was clearly becoming an "ongoing conflict?" And if you were reading the news in America, or Europe, how could you understand the full context of what was unfolding if what motivates the "other side" of the conflict is not understood, or even discussed?


(...)

Lesson Three: To seek to understand and represent to an American audience the reasons behind the Iraqi opposition is practically treasonous.

Every one of the people involved in the resistance that we spoke to held us individually responsible for their security. If something happened to them -- never mind that they were legitimate targets for the U.S. military -- they would blame us. And kill us. We soon learned that they had the U.S. bases so well watched that we had to abandon our idea of working on the U.S. side of the story -- that is, discovering what the soldiers really thought about who might be attacking them. There were so many journalists working with the American soldiers that we believed that that story would be well told. More practically, if we were seen by the Iraqis going in and out of the American bases, we would be tagged immediately as spies, informants and most likely be killed.

As terrifying as that was to manage and work through, there was another fear that was just as bad. What if the American military or intelligence found out what we were working on? Would they tail us and round up the people we met? Would they kick down our door late one night, rifle through all our stuff and arrest us for "collaborating with the enemy?" Bear in mind that there are no real laws in Iraq. At the time that we were working, the American military was the law, and it seemed to me that they were pretty much making it up as they went along. I was pretty sure that if they wanted to "disappear" us, rough us up or even send us for an all expenses paid vacation in Guantánamo for suspected al-Qaida connections, they could do so with very little, or even no recourse on our part.

I could go into a long litany of the ways in which the American military has treated journalists in Iraq. Recent actions indicate that the U.S. military will detain and/or kill any journalist who happens to be caught covering the Iraqi side of the militant resistance, and indeed a number of journalists have been killed by U.S. troops while working in Iraq. This behavior at the moment seems to be limited to journalists who also happen to be Arabs, or Arab-looking, but that is only a tangential story to what I'm telling you about here. "

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more: http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050508/OPINION04/505080346/1054/OPINION


about Molly Bingham:

Bingham was detained and held in Abu Ghraib prison from March 25 to April 2, 2003.

This site keeps lots of data: http://www.cpj.org/

This much seems to destroy any popular media myth that most are killed in weapons crossfire:




http://www.cpj.org/killed/killed_archives/stats.html

as cited here:


Journalists Who Lie, Journalists Who Die
A veteran journalist assesses the international trend of journalists targeted for their truth-telling against a backdrop of recent fraud in American newsrooms.

By Betty Medsger
April 26, 2004

http://foi.missouri.edu/mediacredibility/jwholie.html

Peruvian journalist Gustavo Gorriti, who has endured severe persecution for his reporting, wrote eloquently in 1998 of the influence of American journalists in inspiring some of the most important investigative reporting in Latin America in the last two decades. There, in national cultures in which journalists often had a reputation for corruption, the ones who boldly revealed official corruption gained the confidence and respect of the public. In numerous instances, governments have been forced to change, indeed, have forced out, because of stories that revealed corruption.

"…..The influence of American journalism was decisive," wrote Gorriti. "Its principles of thoroughness, fact-checking, editing, the effective separation between editors and publishers – all this influenced us profoundly.

"Given these standards, we can scarcely fathom the recent journalistic wreckage in the United States. How did competence and integrity dissipate in so many American newsrooms?"

All that hard work by earlier American journalists absolutely squandered by the last generation of "writers." What a damned shame.

Thanks for this information.

And a public and a democracy betrayed.