Most political journalists would not lend their press credentials to radical leftist drunkards they’d met at a bar the night before. Hunter S. Thompson is not most political journalists, though. He is crazy, and so was the man who received his ID during the 1972 Democratic primary campaign. The next day, this counterfeit journalist boarded a campaign bus, physically and verbally assaulted the other reporters on the train, and grabbed then-frontr...
On Friday night, the Columbia University chapter of Liberty in North Korea (LINK) presented a night with journalist, activist, and former North Korea detainee Euna Lee. She spoke about her own story as a reporter and activist (including her detention in Pyongyang), as well as the harrowing and inspiring stories of brave North Korean defectors, and outlined ways in which the foreign community can support the efforts of defectors, detainees, and a...
...to peaceful negotiation. There can be little mutual understanding, for instance, when both sides in a conflict cannot even agree on the basic terms they use. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict continuously puzzles diplomats and journalists for this very reason. Ethan Bronner, a New York Times reporter who covered the conflict, wrote in early 2009, “[T]he two sides speak in two distinct tongues. … [T]he very words they use mean opposite things to ea...
AP photographer Khalil Hamra is injured in Tahrir Square on Thursday. (AP Photo/Mohammed Abed) On January 29, Egyptian journalist Ahmad Mohamed Mahmoud was shot in the head by a sniper as he stepped out on his office balcony to take video of an altercation between security forces and protesters. He died six days later. Somewhere in the depths of the internet about a week ago I read a comment that posed the question, Why do we care about the jou...
...ch in which he employed his usual rhetoric. He announced that the elections were the cleanest and most honest in Russian history, as if saying it would make it so. He included language of a stronger and better future that had journalists drawing parallels to Soviet-era speeches – most notably, Joseph Stalin’s proclamation that “Life’s getting better, and happier, too!” But if one thinks of the elections in the context of the entirety of post-Sovi...
...eech was directed at an audience of about one hundred journalism students, who are the same age now as Woodward was when he investigated the Watergate scandal. A candid and witty Woodward revealed errors he made as a budding journalist, and how he learned precision, persistence, and reexamination from them. Woodward responded to the label of having “taken down Nixon” by pointing to his evidence as being as empirical as possible in proving Nixon’...
...rganizations like Freedom House, the International Republican Institute (IRI), and the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI), which were instrumental in developing campaign efforts abroad. According to journalist Gerald Sussman, the NDI and the IRI contributed millions to Yushchenko’s campaign in 2004. The struggle between Russia and the US in their attempts to influence the Ukrainian elections reveals the tensions of “cam...
...Times, resigned. Critics cite both the Logan Smith and Judith Miller cases as small and large-scale examples of the failures of modern journalism. As New York University professor Clay Shirky contends, gone are the days when journalists were regarded as the most trusted people in America. When Walter Cronkite concluded his nightly newscast with “and that’s the way it is,” people believed him. Today, on the other hand, people are justifiably skep...
Illustration by Daryl Seitchik, Coloring by Stephanie Mannheim It was during the spring of last year that, through a series of fortunate events, I was able to secure an invitation to dinner with famed journalist Bob Woodward. Awaiting Woodward’s arrival, I sat with the five other students, two alumni, and one events coordinator in attendance, the lot of us anxiously preparing questions for his arrival. Woodward graciously received the litany of...
...tent to which pundits are ruled by, and feed, the corporate interests which support their existence. Many media commentators suggest that although news has always been a business, there once existed a greater consciousness of journalistic integrity. Or is that just nostalgia for the good old days? Maybe, but it’s a nostalgia borne out by the rise of corporations and the deregulation of the Reagan Era. During the Regan Era, we saw the refutation o...
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