Iraq
Kimberley Dozier breathing fire
Kimberley Dozier is interviewed on the Bob Rivers show. She recalls the day she almost died when a roadside bomb exploded in Baghdad. Kimberley took part in the recent Frontline Club event in New York. Her book, “Breathing the Fire: Fighting to Report and Survive the War in Iraq”, has just been published.
Ahmed Ali’s story
Bloomberg take a look at the story behind the story of Oliver Poole’s new book the Red Zone. The Daily Telegraph journalist spent five years in Iraq. In the book he pays tribute to the fixer who helped him along the way, a man called Ahmed Ali. Ali eventually fled to the Atlanta by way […]
Iraqi blogger killed in Baghdad
Ahmed, the author of BlogIraq, has been killed in Baghdad. A post written on his blog by a friend, Mohammed Alani, describes how Ahmed was due to meet another man in Mansour District on 11 April. The man was supposed to be giving Ahmed some documents about his investigations into a USAID office in Baghdad. […]
From propaganda to the press
The story of Haider Hamza, an Iraqi Ministry of Information teenage propaganda stooge, who eventually became a Reuters reporter soon after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. This American Life produce this fascinating story, well worth a listen, When he was a teenager, Haider Hamza worked in the Iraqi Ministry of Information. He was specially trained […]
Media victory in Iraq
Sociologist Andrew M. Lindner writes in the latest issue of the American Sociological Association’s Context magazine about his findings on how the media reported, and continue to report, the Iraq war. He says, the dearth of embedded reporting effectively gave an Iraq “media victory” for the Bush Administration, “The embedded program proved to be a […]
Jonathan Steele reads Defeat
Jonathan Steele, senior foreign correspondent for The Guardian, reads from his latest book Defeat: Why America and Britain Lost Iraq for NPR, In the new book Defeat: Why America and Britain Lost Iraq, Jonathan Steele dissects the war and explains how it could have been fought — and planned — more successfully. This reading of […]
Fact check the media
Following on from the non-reaction that greeted the New York Times’ Pentagon media poodles story, Wired’s Danger Room suggests if journalists don’t fancy digging into the story, readers can do it themselves, You can launch your own investigation, right now. The Defense Department has released thousands of pages of documents related to this outreach effort. […]
I lost my love in Baghdad
The Cleveland Plain Dealer reviews Michael Hastings book, I lost my love in Baghdad. Hastings was posted to the Iraqi capital to work out of the Newsweek bureau there. His girlfiend, Andi, was later killed there. Janet Okoben’s review in the Cleveland newspaper is less than complimentary, After his first 10-week reporting stint is up, […]
Sarwa Abdul-Wahab gunned down
Sarwa Abdul-Wahab was gunned down in the Bakir district of Mosul on Sunday. The 35 year old freelanced for the Kurdistan Reporters News Agency and worked as a lawyer defending journalists’ rights. The IHT has more, “She was a member of our association which is based in Baghdad but has a branch in Mosul,” said […]
Would you get out of your tank to apologise?
[video:youtube:tPuyZ5qQLUQ] You’d think the least they’d do is stop, apologise and exchange phone numbers. But, no. Crush some poor blokes car in Iraq and on your way. Rather rude methinks. And just imagine, one second later…
Richard Butler on being held hostage
CBS News journalist Richard Butler discusses his ordeal at the hands of kidnappers in the southern Iraqi city of Basra. He was held for two months until the Iraqi Army rescued him. Butler talks with fellow CBS reporter Allen Pizzey, I am standing there, in front of these eight guys with AK-47s, and I am […]
Richard Butler rescued
[video:youtube:fvMB0cOHW4s] Freelance photographer Richard Butler was rescued by Iraqi soldiers. He was working for CBS News when he was kidnapped on February 10. Iraqi soldiers found him by chance when they happened to be searching the house he was being kept in, “The Iraqi army stormed the house and overcame my guards,” Butler said. “They […]
John Burns talks Iraq
[video:youtube:cBkhFU11DWc] John Burns, Frontline Club founding member and the London bureau chief for New York Times, talks about the legacy of Iraq, his time in the country and the failings of the mainstream media in this ten minute interview on the American show Horizon. John talked at length about the same topic at the club […]
Macmillan bid for Iraq war story
Frontline club founding member Hala Jaber, who works for the Sunday Times, has auctioned the account of her time spent reporting in Iraq to the publishers Macmillan. She calls her account The Flying Carpet of Baghdad. Jaber was named foreign correspondent of the year at the British Press Awards in 2005 and 2006. The Bookseller […]
Michael Kelly’s widow reflects
Michael Kelly was the first American journalist to be killed covering the war in Iraq. He worked as a columnist for the Washington Post and the Atlantic Monthly. Last week marked the fifth anniversary of his death. His family reflect upon his death and their loss in his local Mineral Wells Index newspaper, “I wish […]
Patrick Cockburn on Muqtada al-Sadr
You can now watch the event here. Latest video from the Frontline club events room is up. Award winning war correspondent Patrick Cockburn examines the role of Muqtada al-Sadr – the man who leads a movement in Iraq that opposed both Saddam Hussein and the US occupation. Moderated by the BBC’s Caroline Hawley.
“No shame, no blame”
Writing on the Huffington Post Greg Mitchell, Editor of Editor & Publisher and author of the recent book “So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits and the President Failed on Iraq” goes over the media failings in the run up to Iraq and during the conflict, It’s as if the war had […]
The Baghdad cab
[video:liveleak:979_1206832312] Steve Bent, a photographer at the Sunday Times, takes a leisurely cab ride through Baghdad, At that time of day, the journey of about four miles from our compound to Assassins’ Gate would take 30-40 minutes. And so the order came down to get us there in 10 minutes flat. We are back in […]
Back to Kurdistan
On the BBC World Service, Michael Goldfarb – author of Ahmad’s War, Ahmad’s Peace: Surviving Under Saddam and Dying in the New Iraq – writes and talks about returning to Kurdistan five years after the outbreak of war in Iraq, Erbil, Kurdistan, northern Iraq – every foreign correspondent has one place that gets under the […]
Bush’s War
The PBS Frontline TV show puts online the two part documentary called Bush’s War. The vast multimedia report includes over 400 interviews and 175 video clips. The Producer Michael Kirk answered questions online at the Washington Post, Our focus was the war about the war. We focused on the battleground between the forces that wanted […]
Dodging the death toll
As the number of dead American soldiers in the Iraq war hits the 4,000 mark Katharine Zaleski at The Huffington Post scans through the American newspapers and finds that just two of the nearly 2,500 newspapers in the USA give up the front page to the dizzying death toll. Most prefer to run with stories […]
David Pratt on reporting Iraq
David Pratt remembers working as a journalist in Iraq, the toll on reporters like Caroline Hawley who we blogged about earlier today, and the camaraderie that builds up when working on the frontline of history and conflict, More than anything I’ll remember the Iraq war in this way: a series of cameo moments and lives […]
The stress of war reporting
Catherine Philp writes a great piece in The Times about the personal toll of working as a journalist in Iraq. The feature outlines the dangers and the sheer psychological toll of reporting from a conflict zone that has proved the most deadly in history for journalists. The BBC’s Caroline Hawley tells of the personal toll, […]
5 years on at the Frontline Club
[video:brightcove:1460747551] Not to be outdone, we here at The Frontline Club mark the 5th anniversary of the Iraq war with a discussion in the club’s event room. Two journalists who were working in Iraq at the time discuss the situation. John Burns was the New York Times Bureau Chief in Baghdad before, during and after […]
Fewer reporters in Iraq
The Press Gazette rounds up just how many British media organisations remain in Iraq. There are less British news outlets there than at anytime since the beginning of the American led invasion. The article details the number of people each bureau holds to mark the 5th anniversary since the most dangerous war ever for journalists […]
Dateline Iraq
[video:youtube:NhHjwOU_mOA] Three journalists speak about working in Iraq for Dateline Iraq, a production by the Committee to Protect journalists. TIME Magazine’s Bobby Ghosh, New York Times reporter James Glanz and freelancer Jehad Nga all feature and compare notes about how things were back in 2003 and how things are in 2008, Obtaining reliable information is […]
Can you hear me Baghdad?
[video:youtube:qU1UL0s9qqY] Daniel Finkelstein cranks up the crackly internet videophone and calls fellow Times journalist and blogger Deborah Haynes in Baghdad. You can see and hear the result by clicking the video above. As Daniel says, “Hopefully we’ll have a better line next time.” Amen.
Tired of Iraq
David Bauder at the Associated Press pulls together a few scary stats about the Iraq war and American mainstream media’s coverage of it, For the first 10 weeks of the year, the war accounted for three per cent of television, newspaper and Internet stories in the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s survey of news coverage. […]
Bearing Witness
Reuters and MediaStorm have partnered to produce a stunning multimedia production to mark the fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq. It’s quite the mammoth undertaking with five chapters profiling three journalists with video, photography and snazzy graphics, The site features profiles of three Reuter’s journalists who have more than 23 years combined experience reporting […]
A short guide to Iraq
In 1943 the American military issued a pamphlet to guide their soldiers in Iraq. The GI Pamphlet blog discovered a copy in an old trunk and has re-published it in full, We found this historical gem in an old trunk which was crammed with my mother’s World War II keepsakes. As a US Marine lieutenant, […]
