Some lists are more important than others. Randall Hoven has compiled a list, from various sources, of journalists or media houses that have been caught in lies, plagiaries, conflicts of interest, fraud, or explicit bias. It makes for sobering reading.
No matter where you find people, there you’ll find production, trade, markets and wealth-creation. And no matter where you find central banks running monetary policy, there you’ll find inflation.
When someone breaks an aeroplane, people love to watch. Especially when it’s intentional. Purple Avenger has a spectacular video of a wing destruction test on the Boeing 777. If, on the other hand, it’s your own plane, you don’t want to break it. Especially not when it’s a two-metre model, piloted at 70km/h, from a moving car, in traffic, through a 4km tunnel.
A good friend sent me a copy of a 1994 article from Time magazine on Bang Bang Club photographer Kevin Carter. It stirred a lot of memories. As a student at Wits during South Africa’s transition years, the Weekly Mail was an essential part of the meagre budget, which had to stretch to enough draught at the Bozz to kill an ox, and Senate House coffee strong enough to revive it again. Many of my memories of that era aren’t memories at all. They’re Kevin Carter’s photographs.
The story quotes James Nachtwey, who would go on to shoot a series, entitled Shattered, published in Time on 12 September 2001. They, in turn, form some of the most striking “memories” I have of 9/11.
Carter won a Pulitzer Prize for the photo above. Taken in the Sudan and published in the New York Times on 26 March 1993, it sparked considerable soul-searching about what it meant to be a reporter, to be objective, to observe rather than engage, to show the world rather than intervene. This distressing photograph and the painful questions it raised may well have led, in many ways directly, to Carter’s death by suicide on 27 July 1994. Rest in peace, Kevin. You meant a lot to those who only ever knew you through the images you framed.
Here is a selection of photographs by Carter and the other members of the Bang Bang Club, Greg Marinovich, Joao Silva, and the late Ken Oosterbroek.
Here’s a caption:
An elderly Iraqi woman shows two bullets which she says hit her house following an early coalition forces raid in the predominantly Shiite Baghdad suburb of Sadr City. At least 175 people were slaughtered on Tuesday and more than 200 wounded when four suicide truck bombs targeted people from an ancient religious sect in northern Iraq, officials said.(AFP/Wissam al-Okaili)
First, why does a photo caption about something that happened in Sadr City include news about an entirely unrelated terrorist attack outside Mosul? Second, what’s wrong with the accompanying picture?
The photo was offered for print, e-mail and sale here. I’d suggest that Wissam al-Okaili join Reuters’ Adnan Hajj in the unemployment queue, but one has to note that a halfway intelligent and observant photo editor at Agence France-Presse should really have spotted this one. It’s not exactly subtle.
