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In its debut on the political stage, Hamas swept to a landslide in this week's Palestinian elections. But the group best-known in the West for its suicide bombings didn't campaign on its long-standing goal of eradicating Israel, but rather under the slogan "Reform and Change." Brooke takes a closer look at whether, for the sake of politics, Hamas has really reformed or changed.
Video images of a kidnapped reporter in Iraq were a fixture in the news this week. News of Jill Carroll’s abduction was first reported on the day she went missing, but her identity wasn’t reported until two days later. Not because the press didn’t know her name, but because they’d been asked to keep it under wraps. Boston Phoenix media critic Mark Jurkowitz talks to Brooke about why and when the media resist their instinct to report.
Even before Syria pulled its last soldier out of Lebanon, Gebran Tueni had been an outspoken critic of the occupation. This week, Tueni was killed by a car bomb, becoming the third prominent journalist in Lebanon to be targeted for assassination since Syria's withdrawal. Michael Young, opinion editor for Beirut's Daily Star, tells Bob why he thinks the Lebanese media still pose such a threat to Damascus.
The trial of Saddam Hussein was back in session this week. Here we saw brief excerpts of courtroom theatrics. But in Baghdad, viewers followed the trial's every twist and turn on TVs throughout the city. Brooke talks to L.A. Times correspondent Borzou Daragahi about the spectacle of the Saddam trial as well as its larger backdrop - the heated campaigning of candidates in next week's parliamentary elections.
American war planners are once again fending off challenges to their credibility in the wake of news that they paid Iraqi newspapers to publish good news stories. Many question the ethics - and efficacy - of the project, but others say this sort of "psychological operation" is an integral part of war. Bob talks to intelligence expert James Bamford about the Rendon Group, one of the government's favorite contractors for "strategic communications" campaigns in the lead-up to war.
Last week, Democratic Congressman John Murtha called for a resolution terminating U.S. troop involvement in Iraq. Amid an increasingly acrimonious debate on the Iraq war, his comments drew an extremely sharp reaction from congressional Republicans and the White House. Bob talks to Mark Halperin, political director of ABC News and editor of The Note, about the press coverage of this latest war of words.
A news photo is sometimes worth more than 1,000 words. The image of a napalm-burned Vietnamese child fleeing in terror, for example, resonates decades later in ways that millions of words never quite did. So what if such images were produced not by journalists but by the military itself? In recent months, newspapers large and small have been running pictures from Iraq shot by military personnel. Bob talks to Santiago Lyon, director of photography for the AP, about this trend.
Many films about war have strong anti-war messages. But when real soldiers need to get psyched up for battle, they often pop these very movies into the DVD player. And the films' intended message is lost in the cinematic smoke. Brooke talks to Lawrence Weschler, who wrote about the "trouble with war movies" for Harper's.
