[thechat] reporter fired for reporting

Martin Burns martin at easyweb.co.uk
Mon Mar 31 10:17:40 CST 2003


On Mon, 31 Mar 2003, Erik Mattheis wrote:

> On Monday, March 31, 2003, at 09:40 AM, Bob Haroche wrote:
> > Notably, he said the Iraq government had always been very cooperative
> > with his ability to do his reporting. That struck me as so strange
> > since every other Western journalist to describe what it's like to
> > report from (pre-war) Iraq says that the government assigned 24/7
> > "minders" to the journalists to prevent them from having candid
> > interviews with the population.
>
> On the other hand, the "embedded" reporters are only allowed to do what
> they're told and are not even allowed to use satellite phones.

Also they're entirely dependent on the units they're attached to for food,
shelter and transport, and under a lot of pressure to file stories in for
instant 24x7 news networks. I'd be *very* surprised to see much in the way
of objectivity under those circumstances (print journos in less
editorially-rabid papers are doing it better than most).

And that's without even considering the effect of:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=stockholm+syndrome

http://www.sniggle.net/stock.php
"The Stockholm Syndrome  comes into play when a captive cannot escape, is
isolated and threatened with death, but is shown token acts of kindness by
the captor. It typically takes about three or four days for the
psychological shift to take hold."

Cheers
Martin
-- 
"Names, once they are in common use, quickly
 become mere sounds, their etymology being
 buried, like so many of the earth's marvels,
 beneath the dust of habit." - Salman Rushdie



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