Real journalists rightly pour scorn on those who claim to be journalists but are no more than stenographers of what they have been told or, as happened in Iraq during the invasion, reported from downtown Baghdad hotels - or being embedded with the American military - instead of being out in the field.
Anthony Shadid was your true old-fashioned reporter and journalist. All too sadly, he died last week, in Syria, at the age of 43.
"The death of journalist Anthony Shadid, doing what he'd done for years to tell the story of a Middle East in turmoil to the rest of us, is a huge loss. We will miss his grace and gifts. More here and here. May his memory be a blessing."
- from CommonDreams
From NPR:
"Over the years, Anthony was beaten and abducted while covering the news. He knew he was taking risks. But he also knew (though his unassuming nature would have never let him say it) that he was fulfilling his life's mission, explaining the Arab world to Americans with a fluency and empathy perhaps no other reporter could match."
From The New Yorker:
"There are other great Middle East correspondents working today—Robert F. Worth of the Times, for example—but none with Anthony’s personal story and outlook, which flowed into his story choices, sentences, and techniques. Journalists recognize each other’s signatures and tricks. One of Anthony’s was to frame a story around the proprietor of a single café, bookstore, or university department. It’s not easy to bring a passive character and setting of that sort to life, but Anthony did it again and again. Reading the whole body of his work was like reading a linked series of stories about a world of (usually) men bathed in cigarette smoke, hyped up on coffee, and ready to talk about why the world is the way it is. Like a great short-story writer, Shadid’s use of these characters was neither too heavy nor too light; he let them breathe and speak, and they allowed the reader to join in, to slip inside worlds and ways of thinking normally closed off."
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