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journalism & warEncouraging reporters to become emotionally involved in the stories they cover is a worrying new trend argues the BBC’s David Loyn. He calls for objectivity. Des Freedman sees this as admirable but naive; the problems lie with the larger commercial forces that structure news rather than individual journalists. The debate journies with war reporters through Africa, the Middle East and Chechya, and back to the UK where David Elstein complains about the BBC's coverage during the war in Iraq; Danny Schecter and Lance Bennett both give the US media an earfull for failing to perform critically. Also: what has a philosopher to say about truth and objectivity in journalism?
The architects
of democratic intervention must let the media flourish
Reporting
of war needs to put civilian victims at the centre of the story
The 1988 poison attack on a Kurdish village should discomfort more than Saddam's henchmen (archive)
Media reporting of complex issues needs to escape the curse of formula
The renowned Polish journalist was a voice for pluralism, tolerance, freedom and dignity, says his former colleague Wiktor Osiatyñski. Read the rest of this post...
The foreign correspondent's decades-long observation
and insight revealed truths of power from Tehran and Addis Ababa to
Warsaw itself, says Neal Ascherson.
George W Bush’s musings about bombing the leading Arab satellite TV station betray hard truths about the United States’s “war on terror”, says Saleh Bechir. Read the rest of this post...
When the media reports wars or disasters, why are death tolls announced before bodies are counted? And what does this do to our democracy? Jean Seaton, author of “Carnage and the Media”, dissects the numbers game. Read the rest of this post...
Marielos Monzón, a Guatemalan journalist, received the 2005 Human Rights Journalism Under Threat award from Amnesty International. In her acceptance speech, she describes a land where new injustices have succeeded the horrendous violence of the 1954-96 period. Read the rest of this post...
A dispute over the political views of a leading BBC journalist reflects the concerns of the corporation’s hierarchy over its relationship with Britain’s New Labour government, says David Elstein. Read the rest of this post...
Blair, Campbell, Gilligan, Kelly, Hutton, Davies, Dyke...Butler. What, in essence, has happened in Britain? A digest of the country's unlovely, unnamed, unfinished trauma. Read the rest of this post...
Why are government and media in Britain so hostile to each other? Because each seeks to control the narratives that shape people’s lives, says Tom Bentley of the think-tank Demos. In the process, both are damaged – and so is democracy itself. Read the rest of this post...
How do you tell African stories that engage a world audience? The pioneering African news journalist Sorious Samura – a streetwise sophisticate – talks to Caspar Henderson and Caspar Melville of openDemocracy.net about war, famine, Africa and reality TV. Read the rest of this post...
The BBC is under the spotlight following Lord Hutton’s report, which criticised its coverage of the British use of intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war. How can the broadcaster recover from its latest collision with power? Read the rest of this post...
The crisis in Britain over the Iraq war, its intelligence and its reporting, is one of media as well as politics. John Lloyd asks: can journalism, both press and television, tell stories for active citizens rather than cynical couch potatoes? Read the rest of this post...
The Hutton report reveals the crisis of the British model of governance. Tony Blair and the BBC alike have fed the public realm’s “manipulative populism”, says David Marquand. Will Blair’s leadership now be consumed by it? Read the rest of this post...
The Hutton report is both hopelessly skewed and a devastating critique of the BBC’s failures, says David Elstein. But it provides the corporation with an opportunity to change for the better. Read the rest of this post...
A press corroded by cynicism could not see that the death of a British weapons scientist was a private tragedy, not a political scandal. Read the rest of this post...
The Hutton report on the death of a British scientist blames the BBC and clears Tony Blair, but misses the larger truth of the Iraq weapons affair: the British government’s system of command and control. Read the rest of this post...
The long walk to freedom takes place across language. What happens when words are abused by power, cheapened by war, or corrupted by media? This philosopher-TV executive surveys openDemocracy’s debate on journalism and war, and asks whether George Orwell’s dystopian vision of thought-killing ‘Newspeak’ has been realised in contemporary American journalism. Read the rest of this post...
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