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Columbia Journalism Review content tagged Osama bin Laden

1. May 2, 2011 06:04 PM

   “I Am Not Reporting Anything to You”

   How Fox News, CNN handled the initial Bin Laden news

   By Liz Cox Barrett

   In the event that you were not watching cable news last night, rest assured that Fox News’s Geraldo Rivera and CNN’s Wolf Blitzer handled the breaking Bin Laden news (specifically, the hour or so before the president actually announced that “justice has been done”) exactly as you imagined they would. During the longer-than-expected wait between the announcement of President Obama’s...

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2. May 6, 2011 12:18 PM

   “Obama Osama bin Laden Is Dead”

   The Osama/Obama error is an international phenomenon

   By Craig Silverman

   Of all the mistaken headlines, verbal gaffes, and erroneous tweets that resulted from the Sunday announcement that Osama Bin Laden had been killed, this tour de force of Obama/Osama confusion defeats all comers: I take special pride in the fact that the offending anchor is a fellow Canadian. (She works for Global TV.) It also goes to show that the...

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3. May 11, 2011 03:54 PM

   A 60 Percent Osama Bump?

   New approval rating raises a flap

   By Joel Meares

   An interesting debate about polling samples is underway this afternoon in the wake of a very encouraging new set of figures for President Obama. The figures come from a new and widely cited AP-GfK poll released today that shows the president’s approval rating hitting its highest point in two years (on the AP-GfK poll): 60 percent. That’s a significantly bigger...

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4. May 5, 2011 10:26 AM

   A Tight Deadline, 4,000 Words, Then Ten Years of Waiting

   A Q&A with Kate Zernike, Osama bin Laden's obituarist for the NYT

   By Lauren Kirchner

   When the news of Osama bin Laden’s death broke on Sunday night, every night editor’s dream—or nightmare—came true at The New York Times: the Times’s Eileen Murphy told Chris O’Shea at FishbowlNY that “the order was given to stop the presses.” Monday’s front page was scrapped, and a new front page with top-to-bottom bin Laden coverage was ready to go...

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5. May 12, 2011 03:29 PM

   Bin Laden Unnerved by al Qaeda Magazine

   By Joel Meares

   ProPublica’s Sebastian Rotella has spoken to “two U.S. officials familiar with material seized during the raid that killed bin Laden” and drawn from them some very interesting details on the till-now mysterious cache. Writes Rotella, “The material has been translated from Arabic and culled from computers, discs, thumb drives and bin Laden's handwritten notes, said the officials, who spoke to...

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6. May 5, 2011 10:05 AM

   How State-Funded TV Stations Covered the Osama News

   A look at Russia Today, Press TV, France 24, and others

   By Linette Lopez

   Around the world, state-funded satellite TV stations—like Russia Today (RT), Iran’s Press TV, China’s CCTV, France 24 and Al Jazeera—are broadcasting world news as they see it. That means that millions are hearing stories from new perspectives, and stories like the death of Osama Bin Laden can vary dramatically, depending on which channel you’re watching. So let’s say that, on...

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7. May 2, 2011 11:39 AM

   International News Sites Cover bin Laden’s Death

   At varying decibels

   By Justin D. Martin

   CAIRO—One of the benefits of teaching outside the U.S. is that I get to work with polyglot students. In my journalism ethics classes today, I scrapped my lesson plans and decided to peek at Osama bin Laden coverage on news sites in the many languages my students speak. I can read Arabic and English, but my students make me look...

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8. May 13, 2011 11:00 AM

   Notes on Faked Photos

   Bin Laden’s death shows the possibilities for manipulation are endless

   By Craig Silverman

   Consider three images from the last couple of weeks: 1. President Barack Obama finishes his address announcing the killing of Osama Bin Laden and walks away from the cameras. After a brief break, he walks back down the same carpet and begins re-reading lines from the speech so that five photojournalists can snap shots of him. When distributing the images,...

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9. May 2, 2011 05:10 PM

   Osama bin Laden, 54, Public Enemy No. 1

   A review of the obits

   By Lauren Kirchner

   Osama bin Laden was the world’s most powerful terrorist. He was also, undeniably, the most famous. And as befits any celebrity, when his death was announced, many news organizations were ready with a biographical piece that had been pre-written and -filed in preparation for the occasion, perhaps years beforehand. Many news reports to come out since Sunday night contain background...

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10. August 12, 2011 12:39 PM

    Schmidle in Secret

    New Yorker keeps mum on fact-checking process for bin Laden piece

    By Craig Silverman

    Amid the discussion and debate about the sourcing and accuracy of Nicholas Schmidle’s lengthy retelling of the Bin Laden raid in The New Yorker, we’ve failed to hear from one important group of people. They have the detailed information about the sourcing of the article, and spoke to Schmidle’s sources to confirm the details long before it was published. I’m...

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11. May 2, 2011 01:25 PM

    Sunday Night Screenshots

    How the news websites did bin Laden

    By Lauren Kirchner

    This Monday morning, the headlines practically wrote themselves, and there was no question about which story would get top billing. Poynter has a selection of front pages from print editions taken from the Newseum website, with headlines ranging from the staid Wall Street Journal’s “U.S. Forces Kill Osama Bin Laden” to Edmonton Sun’s “BURN IN HELL!” to The Baltimore Sun’s...

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12. December 30, 2011 02:41 PM

    What a Year!

    A foreign editor looks back in wonder at 2011

    By Thomas Nagorski

    On a weekend last January I sent Alex Marquardt, our newly minted Mideast correspondent, to cover a protest in Egypt. Tunisia’s long-time dictator, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, had fallen in stunningly fast fashion a week before, and together Alex and I had wondered whether something similar was stirring in the Egyptian capital. I really didn’t think so—certainly we didn’t...

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13. May 3, 2011 03:52 PM

    Where Did You Get Your bin Laden News?

    And now, where do you go for analysis?

    By The Editors

    Sometimes the news is so big you just have to have the details right away, and the death of Osama bin Laden is a case in point. With a story like this, we’ll be hungry for the details for days, including reporting on some complicated questions. (Did torture help find him, or not? What did Pakistan’s military really know about...

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