"prison journalism" in baghdad

[Bhaisahab]

excerpted from Robert Fisk's article at
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9896.htm

I head off to the Palestine Hotel where one of the largest Western news agencies has its headquarters. I take the lift to an upper floor only to be met by a guard and a vast steel wall which blocks off the hotel corridor. He searches me, sends in my card and after a few minutes an Iraqi guard stares at me through a grille and opens an iron door.

I enter to find another vast steel wall in front of me. Once he has clanged the outer door shut, the inner door is opened and I am in the grotty old hotel corridor.

The reporters are sitting in a fuggy room with a small window from which they can see the Tigris river. One of the American staff admits he has not been outside "for months". An Arab reporter does their street reporting; an American travels around Iraq - but only as an "embed" with US troops. No American journalists from this bureau travel the streets of Baghdad. This is not hotel journalism, as I once described it. This is prison journalism.

One of the Americans, an old and brave friend of mine from Beirut days, walks over. "Have a look at this, Fisky," he says. "This is the kind of crap we get from the Americans these days - this is what they want us to write about." It is a news release from the Coalition press office, the spin doctors of the occupation troops here. "Comics Bring Barrels of Laughs to Task Force Baghdad," it says.

[Mnemosyne]

1. Fisk has a way of getting to the heart

of the matter. Here's another great article he wrote:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9896.htm

Thanks for this post kutta.

[izzie]

2. I always like to read Fisk. Guardian has a good item this morning

It is about another city in Iraq we can not go into.