Journalism Research and Random Meanderings

Sunday, March 21, 2004

CBC News: Deadline Iraq - Uncensored Stories of the War 

All materials Copyright © CBC 2003

Excerpt:These are the stories that weren’t told by the media during the Iraq war. CBC NEWS goes straight to the source, to journalists, camera operators and photographers from news organizations around the world, who reveal the lethal risks they faced, as well as the untold horrors they witnessed.

Excerpt: INTRODUCTION

There were two wars in Iraq. One featured soldiers. The other featured journalists. News organizations competed with one another, and the resulting risks journalists took to be first on a given story sometimes got them killed. The fact is that journalists and journalism were often front and centre in the stories that came out of the conflict. Embedding versus unilateral. The high mortality rate of journalists. Criticisms surrounding the soundness of the coverage. The unprecedented speed and immediacy of transmitting words and pictures of combat.

Now that the war is "over", journalists and journalism are still making headlines. Christiane Amanpour of CNN has stated that the coverage of the war, particularly in America, was too driven by patriotism. John Burns of the New York Times recently said that the Iraq war highlights how corrupt journalism has become. His colleague at the Times, Judith Miller, has herself been accused by some media observers of being corrupted by Pentagon influences. The controversy around Tony Blair and the BBC's coverage of the war continues to boil.

CBC News: Deadline Iraq - Uncensored Stories of the War