Journalists Who Lie, Journalist Who Die

[maddezmom]

By Betty Medsger (More articles by this author)

I wonder if Jayson Blair, Jack Kelley and Stephen Glass, the best known of American journalism’s recently discovered practitioners of fraud, know about Manik Saha, Sajid Tanoli and Ruel Endrinal. While the U.S. trio wrote stories composed of lies, the other three journalists were among the many journalists in other countries who paid the ultimate price for revealing the truth.

Manik Saha, a veteran journalist in Bangladesh for the daily New Age and BBC's Bengali-language service, died January 15 when a bomb was hurled at his rickshaw and decapitated him. He was well known in his home country for bold reporting on criminal gangs, drug traffickers, and Maoist insurgents.

Sajid Tanoli, a reporter with the Urdu-language daily Shumal in Pakistan, was shot and killed in Pakistan January 29 by a local government official who was enraged about an article Tanoli had written a few days earlier about an allegedly illegal liquor business run by the official.

...most journalists who were killed were hunted down and murdered, often in direct reprisal for their reporting.
Ruel Endrinal was killed February 11 by two unidentified gunmen. They shot him in the foot and then continued shooting him in the head and body until he fell dead. His death is believed by investigators to be the price he paid for speaking out against local politicians and criminal gangs on a political commentary program he hosted on a broadcast outlet in Legazpi City in the eastern Philippines.

It is a striking aspect of the changing international journalism landscape that American journalism, however fine much of it is, currently is best known for the fraud some journalists have committed as journalists, sinking their own careers and damaging the reputation of the profession by reporting stories that were lies in full or in part. Blair, Kelley, and Glass have become household names, symbols of a corruption and malaise that many in and out of journalism fear may be far more widespread than we now know. In recent weeks I’ve heard several very worried editors, most of them people who have judged major journalism competitions, wonder how many more are hiding in their newsrooms.

more:
http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=64562

[rpannier]

1. I always find it interesting to see the differences between US talking heads and foreign journalists

I get Australian TV here in Korea and ABC (Australia Broadcasting) takes some fairly pointed jabs at American reporters.

A couple of examples:

Howard Kurtz was on Jim Middleton's show:

(These are not the exact quotes, but are as close as I can remember from the exchanges)

Middleton: There seems to be a lot of criticism, some of it very sharp about the press in the United States and the poor job it is doing.

Kurtz: Well, I've been criticized by both the right and left, so I must be doing something right.

Middleton: It's too bad the Germans didn't win World War II, because Hitler was a great visionary. This world would have been so much better off with the Nazi's and their allies ruling the world. There'd be far more harmony.
Now, I'll be equally criticized by both the right and the left by this comment, so therefore, by your logic it must be a valid and sound argument.

I love it when people point out the lazing reasoning by US news people.

From MBC in Korea:

According to every poll the public is very concerned about Free-trade and its ramifications. There are numerous incidences of the workers that been abused, yet they have no more protections than they did before the free-trade agreement was signed and they're not making any more money.
There has been little reporting on this. The only coverage in the US is the benefits. This is because free-trade improves their stocks and 401k's.

(This report was during the free-trade agreement between the US and Korea)