...I'm okay with being REALITY-based.




Friday, April 11, 2003
      ( 8:54 AM )
 
Today's Rare Find: Journalists with Spines

From Democracy Now:
SPANISH JOURNALISTS PROTEST DEATH OF COLLEAGUE WHO WAS KILLED BY U.S. FORCES
Spanish Journalists protested the death
of a Spanish TV cameraman killed by a U.S.
tank shell in Baghdad yesterday by putting
their cameras, microphones and notebooks
on the floor as Prime Minister Jose Maria
Aznar arrived at the Senate.

Aznar found the floor outside the chamber
covered with equipment and 30 to 40
journalists standing in stony silence.

In a further display of anger, about 20
Spanish journalists walked out of a
news conference with British Foreign
Minister Jack Straw and his Spanish
counterpart, Ana Palacio, after just
one question.
---Maria Carrion, filmmaker and
former Democracy Now! producer.

On the show Carrion said that the journalists are demanding an inquiry into the U.S. explanation of what happened at the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad. Some of the journalists who put their cameras and notebooks down when the Prime Minister came into the press conference also turned their backs on him and held up pictures of the murdered Spanish cameraman. Can you imagine what might happen if American journalists had guts like that - to actually be gatekeepers for the truth? To demand inquiries, to actually insist that the government do what it's supposed to? I can only say hats off to the Spanish journalists and that I only wish we even HAD journalists here who were willing to seek out truth instead of have falsities and propaganda spoon fed to them.


| -- permanent link