Tags: reporting

Sempervivum

Journalists lost in Iraq

Buried on the second page of this NY Times article on the death of an Iraqi archbishop

Qassim Abdul-Hussein al-Iqabi, 35, a reporter and journalism student, was shot to death as he drove to work through the Karada neighborhood in Baghdad. He was a reporter for The Citizen, an Arabic-language newspaper here. According to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, at least 127 journalists and 50 technical and other media workers have been killed in Iraq since the American invasion in 2003.


The Frontline Club - Blogs.

Sempervivum

While I like the Guardian

Occasionally a reporter will make a comment which seems glaringly biased, even to me:

Death in the desert: how families are consoled when bodies are found
James Randerson, science correspondent
Wednesday March 7, 2007
Pina County... used to see a handful of deaths each year, an average of 14 in the 1990s. The average for 2000 to 2005 was 166. Along the whole border, there were 472 deaths in 2005 and preliminary data for last year suggest 500 to 600, and a quarter are children. In the last decade, the 2,000-mile US-Mexico border has proved over 10 times more deadly than the Berlin wall, and the figures are almost certainly gross underestimates.

This is somewhat sensationalist phrasing which comes over as anti-American. The US-Mexico border is a lot longer than the Berlin wall and the populations involved are larger. Plus,of course, they're not all getting shot by soldiers; they are dying in the desert because the fortification of crossing points near big cities in the late 1990's (to make it harder for illegal immigrants) effectively redirected them towards more inhospitable sparsely-populated areas in Arizona. Rather than leaving them behind while they try to work in the US for a few years, because its harder to cross back and forth, they bring their families to settle, so more children suffer the crossing.

There was a lot about the article I liked, but I was vexed that this inappropriate and emotive statistic had been tossed in by a science correspondent.