Posted on 05/19/2005 5:07:14 PM PDT by Pikamax
Guild Chief Under Fire for Comments About Attacks on Journalists in Iraq
By Joe Strupp
Published: May 19, 2005 4:40 PM ET
NEW YORK Linda Foley, national president of The Newspaper Guild, drew strong criticism today from some conservative groups for comments she made last Friday about the killing of journalists in Iraq. Foley said, among other things, that she was angry that there was "not more outrage about the number and the brutality, and the cavalier nature of the U.S. military toward the killing of journalists in Iraq. I think it's just a scandal."
The backlash became so severe Thursday that staffers at Guild headquarters in Washington, D.C., stopped answering the phone because of abusive phone calls and "people screaming at us," Foley said. Instead, callers were required to leave messages on voice mail and await a return call.
"We don't want people to be subjected to that kind of abuse," Foley said, adding that the angry calls began early Thursday. "It is annoying, but it isn't deterring us from doing what we have to do."
The calls were apparently in reaction to comments Foley made during a panel discussion at the National Conference for Media Reform in St. Louis on May 13. There she offered a lengthy commentary on corporate ownership of media, and she refuted certain criticism of journalists. During that session, she also briefly discussed deaths of journalists covering the war.
Foley's comments, which he says have been distorted, have already drawn the ire of several conservative news organizations, including NewsMax.com, The Washington Times, and Sinclair Broadcasting, charging that she accused the U.S. forces of deliberately targeting journalists.
According to a video of the session available on the conference's Web site, her only comments on this specific subject were:
"Journalists are not just being targeted verbally or politically. They are also being targeted for real in places like Iraq. And what outrages me as a representative of journalists is that there's not more outrage about the number and the brutality, and the cavalier nature of the U.S. military toward the killing of journalists in Iraq. I think it's just a scandal."
"It's not just U.S. journalists either, by the way. They target and kill journalists from other countries, particularly Arab countries, at news services like Al Jazeera, for example. They actually target them and blow up their studios, with impunity. This is all part of the culture that it is OK to blame the individual journalists, and it just takes the heat off of these media conglomerates that are part of the problem."
A NewsMax.com story charged that Foley had accused U.S. soldiers of "committing atrocities without offering any evidence to back the charge up." Mark Hyman, a Sinclair commentator, called her comments "irresponsible" and "horrible allegations." Several critics immediately compared her criticism to the case of Eason Jordan, the former CNN executive who resigned after suggesting that U.S. military personnel may have targeted journalists in Iraq.
Last month, Foley sent a letter to President Bush criticizing the U.S. investigation into the deaths of journalists in Iraq.
Foley told E&P Thursday that her words were taken out of context by critics and said her original intent was to discuss how journalists are often scapegoated for their coverage. "This was almost an aside," she said. "But it is true that hundreds of journalists are killed around the world, and many have been killed in Iraq."
When asked if she believed U.S. troops had targeted journalists in Iraq, she said, "I was careful of not saying troops, I said U.S. military. Could I have said it differently? There are 100 different ways of saying this, but I'm not sure they would have appeased the right."
She did point out that those who bombed the Al Jazeera studios in Baghdad in 2003 had the coordinates of the television station, "because Al Jazeera had given it to them and they bombed the hell out of the station. They bombed it knowing it was the Al Jazeera station. Absent any independent inquiry that tells the world otherwise, that is what I believe."
Her comments at the conference followed the letter she sent last month to President Bush criticizing the U.S. investigation into the deaths of journalists in Iraq, including several during an attack on the Palestine Hotel in 2003.
In that attack, two journalists -- one form Spain and the other from Ukraine -- were killed. She also noted the bombing of the Al Jazeera office the same day, in which a reporter died. "Neither of these attacks has been independently investigated nor have the deaths been properly explained to the satisfaction of the victims' families, their friends and their colleagues," the letter said, in part.
bump
Strupp is on O'Reilly right now. Over in a couple minutes.
The author is on BOR presently.
?They target and kill journalists from other countries, particularly Arab countries, at news services like Al Jazeera, for example."
If only the raving idiot were telling the truth.
If they din't like the phone calls they sure won't like the walk in traffic that may follow.
Never seen a hair split quite that thin before. Hand me a microscope, please...
OH, that's different. It was the US Military's HAL 9000 that did it.
I LOVE how the libs have learned their lesson from Vietnam and now go out of their way to say oh, no, no, no, we're not criticizing the troops--the ones who actually pull the triggers! We're critixizing THE MILITARY!" They don't even have the guts to blame the people who are pulling the triggers. (I of course think this is bunk, but their bs is pretty blatant--who isn't responsible in their bizarre theories if not the actual soldiers who are shooting the weapons?)
As for bombing Al Jazeera, I don't mean to sound like an armchair general, but it seems like a legitimate target to me. They're a propaganda wing of the Islamic jihad pretending to be an objective journalistic enterprise.
Newspaper Guild The, (202) 434-7177, 501 3rd St NW, Washington, DC 20001
Newspaper Guild The, (202) 434-7177, 501 3rd St NW, Washington, DC 20001
With the CBS fiasco, ABC memo, Newsweek, and now this, it's no wonder that FOX continues to gain market share.
Civilians who voluntarily go to a war zone and put themselves in danger are probably going to be wounded or killed. (And I am guessing their beneficiaries have a lot better death benefits than those of the military.)
Even if she says she isn't accusing the soldiers of targeting journalists, isn't she implying that "The military" has a duty to protect those glory-hogging journalists and/or to specifically investigate journalists' deaths? Are journalists' lives more valuable than soldiers' or other civilians' lives?
Inquiring minds want to know.
we've maintained that no one should be disciplined or fired for anything they write for publication
we'll have a human rights and diversity coordinator in every Newspaper Guild local... There should always be someone there asking, "How are we making the union more diverse?
http://tinyurl.com/dddcl
So the “US military is killing journalists, but not the troops.
It must be those bigfoots we dressed up in military uniforms and armed. US military bigfoots and leprechauns.
Not only is she a friggin' lying slandering bitch, she's a gutless punk about it to boot.
She is flat out accusing the US Miitary of targeting journalists.
She is a NUT JOB!!!
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