EVENT: CJR’s Assignment Iraq
FROM: Michael Hoyt, Executive Editor, Columbia Journalism Review
Dear students,
In 2004 Farnaz Fassihi of The Wall Street Journal sent an e-mail to friends and relatives about what it was like to be a journalist in Iraq. Somebody in the chain posted the letter on the Internet and it quickly went around the world. Among journalists the reaction was varied: some worried that an objective reporter had revealed too much; others thought the e-mail was dead on.
Meanwhile, something about the personal nature of the note communicated the reality of what Iraqis call “the situation” more forcefully than yards of standard prose. Here at CJR we wanted more, and for our forty-fifth anniversary issue we interviewed some fifty journalists who have covered the war. Out of their anecdotes and insights we have constructed an oral history of the war, the first of its kind, and we invite you read the issue when it comes out next week.
We also invite you to attend a panel discussion with five journalists who have covered Iraq on Thursday, November 2, from 7 to 9 in the lecture hall. These people have studied “the situation” closely, some of them for four years or more. They are:
Deborah Amos: Foreign correspondent for NPR and ABC News. Author of Lines in the Sand: Desert Storm and the Remaking of the Arab World.
Rajiv Chandrasekaran: Washington Post assistant managing editor, former Baghdad bureau chef, and author of Imperial Life in the Emerald City.
Ali Fadhil: A physician and translator. He has collaborated with journalists from The Financial Times, Time, The Guardian, People, The Observer, The New Yorker and NPR.
Patrick Graham: Canadian freelance journalist who spent a year with the Iraqi resistance in Fallujah. His work has appeared in The London Observer, Harpers and other publications
Chris Hondros: A prizewinning photojournalist whose work has appeared on the covers of magazines such as Newsweek and The Economist, and on the front pages of most major American newspapers.
We hope you can join us.
Mike
