Just because a reporter is filing news from a foreign assignment, doesn't mean the news is accurately forwarded to viewers. I'm not telling you anything you don't already know, but sometimes there comes a need to have verification.
We expect that kind of thing from Fox and other major corporate media, but not from NPR. But here's an article from a former NPR reporter, Sarah Chayes, who became an activist and is now working on development projects in Kandahar, talking about her time reporting in Afghanistan:
"The worst period in my entire career," a dear friend confided as we were comparing notes afterwards. He sent me a list of story ideas his editors had turned down. "They simply didn't want any reporting," he explained. "They told us the story lines, and asked us to substantiate them." CNN correspondents received written instructions on how to frame stories of Afghan suffering. A BBC reporter told me in our Quetta hotel the weekend before Kabul fell how he had had to browbeat his desk editors to persuade them that Kandahar was still standing.
NPR was not entirely immune. My one civilian casualty story, I hasten to note, which drew vituperative reactions from listeners, enjoyed the full support of my editors. But as time went on, I sensed a rising impatience with my reporting. In that same period between the fall of Kabul and the fall of Kandahar, when the BBC correspondent had trouble with his desk, a senior NPR staffer e-mailed to say that he no longer trusted my work as he had in the past: [Letter]
...Many ask how it feels to put down my microphone. What I have discovered is an extraordinary liberty in being allowed to implicate myself, in being permitted to draw and explicitly voice the conclusions of my observations - conclusions journalists can only imply in their stories, hoping the public will get the drift.
P.S. There's actually a group called Reporters Without Borders.
Sunday, December 14, 2003
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