The New York Times’s Lens blog reports that photographer Moises Saman was “mildly injured” on Tuesday in Tunisia when six police officers assaulted him.
Mr. Saman was attempting to photograph a group of police officers beating a man in an alley off the main Avenue Bourguiba. The police noticed Mr. Saman’s camera and attacked him without explanation.
Lens also reports that photographer Lucas Mebrouk Dolega died last week in Tunis when a tear gas canister hit his head during a riot.
We spoke to Saman in October when pictures he took in Iraq were featured on the front pages of Saturday and Sunday editions of the Times to illustrate the paper’s WikiLeaks Iraq War Logs reporting. It was also shortly after his friend and colleague João SIlva had been injured in Afghanistan. Asked if the news made him reconsider his line of work, Saman said:
I don’t know that reconsider is the right word; it’s more of a reality check. People who do what we do or spend enough time working on these subjects have a passion for what we do. We think it’s important. But when something like this happens there are many questions that go through your mind. You try to reconcile that sense of loyalty to a story—the reason you got into the business in the first place. You have to keep focused and continue to do your job. I still feel strongly that it’s very important to have independent journalism, especially from conflict zones.
[WikiLeaks cables: FCO 'refused to speak with doomed British hostage' Foreign Office officials turned down the opportunity to speak to a British man held hostage in Mali before his execution because they did not want to be seen to negotiate with terrorists, cables obtained by WikiLeaks indicate.] UK Telegraph.
It would be useful to have an update on the current role of the UK Telegraph, since the paper is breaking a lot of WikiLeaks stories right now.
Among the news sites associated with the Ivy League universities (Harvard Crimson, Yale Daily News, Daily Pennsylvanian, Columbia Spectator), CJR would have to rate as invaluable.
Perhaps the student press at Princeton, Cornell, Dartmouth, and Brown could be improved (I think so).
But what would be best of all would be an IVY Express site in which all eight universities (with partners such as MIT and NYU) would share analytical resources, and try to get a systematic overview on academic issues.
The site could also be a test point for hardware (Chillblast Fusion Dimension), and also the complete Adobe creative suite.
In case Ivy League students have not noticed, the US is afflicted with obsolescence. If we were to examine the mysterious practices of AP Psychology and note the potential to teach fundamentals to students from grades nine to twelve by starting with a good text in Cognition (Ashcraft) and then working into Memory (Baddeley and/or Schwartz), we would see that the generic AP approach to Psychology is hopeless.
The fundamental texts for the English language are the COBUILD grammars, intermediate and advanced. It is also important to have an official high school corpus dictionary, such as the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English with its powerful CD. Language, of course, is an important subject in Cognition. Within the Psychology "community" (APA etc) the "idea" of how to teach English is absurd. A Psychology department would be likely to offer "The Academic Writer's Handbook" as a substitute for all the advances made in the corpus revolution in Linguistics in the past twenty years.
Young people might think that this disarray is just normal churning and obsolescence, and that you can't do anything about it. However, if we were to track the activities of the FBI, we would note routine incompetence (in 9/11), and even today, at a level that indicates training is too inept to count for much. (I was not at all surprised to receive a despairing e-mail from a professor at Marine university indicating that American universities are so mired in curriculum conservatism that it is impossible for them to be truly reflective about their practices.)
If terrorists were to decide to take out Yale, Harvard, or Princeton with a dirty bomb, it is quite possible that the stumbling FBI would just miss obvious signs, or fail to collate information. The FBI would not then revolutionize practices in psychology in its training. It would just expect the young people of Princeton, Harvard, or Yale to pay the price for its inept mindset. What prevents the FBI from teaching the books in Psychology and English that I have mentioned? Nothing. Just abrasive indifference to duty.
It used to be that young people could graduate from university and look for a ready-made role in society. But the world has changed forever. The youth will have to create systems so that when a CIA/FBI training/education pathology has been identified, the disorder will be overpowered in a timely way. Anyone who did a close reading of "Class 11," the shaky and inconclusive book on CIA training, would be amazed at the dullness of intellect that goes into such programs.
That systems now exist for decisive policy/practice corrections must be seen as a dream. I think that it would be extremely creative of Ivy League students to develop www.ivyexpress.com. I would certainly read it religiously. The UK Guardian, The Australian, and WSJ
#1 Posted by Clayton Burns, CJR on Fri 4 Feb 2011 at 12:53 PM