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February 04, 2005
Eason Jordan: Tick Tick Tick
In the steady disintermediation presaging a major shift in the way industries do business, Eason Jordon is being hoisted on the petard of disclosure. Blogs do it better than major media, and as others in the blogswarm have noted correctly, we are going to hound down and parse the question of journalistic privilege during wartime.
For excellent reading on the subject, see Rony Abovitz.
Right now I believe that US soldiers were too busy doing real soldiering, that nobody here really reported, to target harmeless and discredited Arab journalists. But I would not be surprised if Arab embeds on the rebel side got blown up collaterally, many times.
But the larger question, it seems to me, keeps coming back to the nature of what our attention sustains, and what value it truly has. I certainly feel indebted to those journalists who are truly war correspondants, like Dexter Filkins who are not afraid to go into the middle of the shooting and bring some perspective about battles onto our screens.
Somewhere in this blog, I have advocated for WarTV, all combat all the time. I want to see video images from the fronts. I know this to be impossible - there is a certain Heisenberg effect that would be generated by live coverage that no self-respecting general wants. I think the 'video game' coverage of laser guided bombs is about as close as we're ever going to get to that. Short of this kind of 'trial of the century' wall to wall coverage, I think we as an audience have to judge the effect our attention has on what data becomes ethically distributable. In other words, our hunger for news is the sole reason that journalists are in the middle of wars anyway.
If Knowledge = Pain, then the curious are masochistic, and voyuers are sadistic. (wrings hands, twists moustache) Let's see what happens as the clock runs down on Eason Jordan.
Posted by mbowen at February 4, 2005 09:26 AM
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