Feral Beast: Roxana free at last

Monday, May 11, 2009

Roxana free at last

The jailed Iranian-American journalist Roxena Saberi has left her cell in Tehran and is with her parents.Her suspended sentence allows her to leave Iran, and she will return to the US within the next four days, they said.
click here to see the latest wire reports on her freedom. Her lawyer implied that spying charges were based on the fact that she had downloaded a secret document onto her computer after translating it for an employer in Iran.
Meanwhile, another much longer- term political prisoner, Aung Sang Suu Kyi, is languishing in Burma. Doctors were summoned to see her in the lakeside residence where she has been imprisoned.

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Feral Beast? Try Lemming

If the press were an animal, what kind of animal would it be? I’ve got my answer. A legion of lemmings, furry and well-intentioned, but ultimately condemned by their nature to follow each other mindlessly off a tall cliff, over the Paris Hilton peak or into the Invade Iraq crevasse. The words “feral beast” certainly wouldn’t come to mind. It’s not particularly accurate or particularly evocative. But that is how the departing British prime minister, Tony Blair, sees journalists: as malicious tormentors who have tried to tear him limb from limb.

--Gal Beckerman of the Columbia Journalism Review

“Journalism is a form of cartography,” write Tom Rosenstiel and Bill Kovach of Pew. “It creates a map for citizens to navigate society. Inflating events for sensation, neglecting others, stereotyping or being disproportionately negative all make a less reliable map.”

"Journalism is good at solving small problems or taking small bites of a big problem. It’s not good at solving big problems." Adapted from David Simon, creator of The Wire.

Retrospective : five decades of journalism as reported by CJR

Fake AP Stylebook reminds us: Unless you're doing a story on the Muppets, you are not a gonzo journalist.

"The once idealized information superhighway has become a parking lot of error, misinformation, rumor and junk." Poynter Institute, advocating a broader definition of who is a journalist.