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Three years ago, hopes were high for the newly-liberated Iraqi media. But more than a dozen Iraqi journalists have been arrested this year for “insulting public officials” and “inciting violence,” raising the spectre of Saddam-era censorship and retribution. Bob talks to Simon Haselock, former advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority, about what happened to the legal protections for journalists that he helped create.
Army Lt. Col. Barry Johnson observed last month that the number of embedded reporters in Iraq stood officially at 11, down from a high of more than 600 in March, 2003. The Era of the Embed seems to have passed – but at what price? Brooke puts the question to Sig Christenson, president of Military Reporters & Editors.
Embedded reporters are fleeing the barracks in Iraq, leaving the burden of telling the story to the brave few un-embedded. But whereas Western reporters could once travel freely, they now rely on their Iraqi “fixers” to bring the reporting to them. Brooke tells the story of three of those fixers, pulled into journalism by a trick of fate.
We revisit the question with Larry Diamond, a former advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority, argues to Bob that the term insurgency misrepresents the reality in Iraq. And Peter Galbraith, an American advisor to the Kurdish government, maintains that Iraq will never be a stable, unified country.
Apart from opinion columns and magazine pieces, news outlets tend to place any mention of civil war in the mouths of sources, or qualify it with phrases like “on the brink of” and “risks descending into.” Brooke asks New York Times Deputy Foreign Editor Ethan Bronner why.
We revisit the question with Larry Diamond, a former advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority, argues to Bob that the term insurgency misrepresents the reality in Iraq. And Peter Galbraith, an American advisor to the Kurdish government, maintains that Iraq will never be a stable, unified country.
With tensions escalating between Washington and Tehran, and the IAEA trying to cut through both sides’ spin, some in the intelligence community are getting an eerie sense of déjà vu. Guest host Mark Jurkowitz talks to McClatchy Newspapers foreign affairs correspondent Warren Strobel about what journalists can do this time to avoid the mistakes they made in the lead-up to the Iraq war.
In 1971, Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times. Now, with bellicosity about Iran in the Beltway air, Ellsberg is renewing his call for insiders to leak. He and Brooke discuss the tension between government employees’ contract to keep secrets and their oath to uphold the Constitution.
