Journalism

Summer 2011

Revolutions are televised by Arab journalists

The world watched people rise up this year against dictators and authoritarian regimes across the Middle East and northern Africa, their protests aired by satellite television and the Internet. In Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Bahrain, and other countries, journalists televised, twittered, and spread the “electronic virus,” as Lawrence Pintak calls the media revolution, around the Arab world.

Pintak, founding dean of the Murrow College of Communication and a former Middle East correspondent for CBS, says satellite TV plays the critical role in the protests. Eighty percent of the Arab world gets its news from television, and international news in Arabic, produced by … » More …

Fall 2003

The first casualty

Vietnam was the last conflict in which reporters could speak and write with prudent freedom.

During one of the nation’s many wars, I wrote of a patrol that came under fire and killed an enemy soldier. Before continuing, the GIs cut off the dead man’s genitals, and forced them into his mouth, leaving also a playing card-Ace of Spades-on his body. The soldiers said that such were enemy superstitions, that they would not cross over a dead man so festooned, thus it was required to keep the other side effectively tethered if the patrol was to complete its mission.

It was a poor excuse for … » More …

Fall 2004

Viewing life through the lens of a camera

After a dozen years as a photojournalist with KIRO-TV, Brian Miller left the security of a television-station job in 1998 to start his own company, Wide Angle TV.

Two factors influenced his decision-time and money. And he yearned to be independent.

He now works one-third as much as he did before and earns three times the money, he says. But the freelance business can be unpredictable, subject to such variables as the weather and the economy.

Miller won’t venture a guess at an “average” work week. “There isn’t any”-and he’s fine with that. Some days he might put in 15-20 hours-when he’s working. The downside … » More …