A foreign correspondent uses her phone after four Palestinian boys were killed by Israeli shelling in front of hotel where many reporters were staying.
Shortly after Israel began its ground invasion of Gaza, Anne Barnard, a New York Times reporter who has covered wars for over a decade, stood in the emergency room of the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City and watched a 9-year-old girl die.
The girl was alone, without family, nameless. And when the doctor finally pronounced her dead, Barnard and another reporter wept.
And then she tweeted:
...
Israel faces a challenge now that it never dealt with in the pre-Twitter age, when the constructs of journalism actually helped mitigate the strength of that first overwhelming response that any reporter — any human being — would have to a situation of death and destruction. Newspaper articles strive toward an unemotional style, with editors cutting out anything that might hint at bias. We can see the difference if you look at the way Barnard’s experience with the dying girl at Al-Shifa made it into her story (co-bylined with Isabel Kershner) about the battle in the neighborhood of Shejaiya. A paragraph toward the bottom of the article, after much context — including an explanation of the fighting by an Israeli government official — described the scene in a much more muted way in a few economical sentences (“They covered her with a white sheet, and she was gone”). Nowhere near the raw emotional impact of her tweet.
Source
Re: This evening in Israel
Reply With Quote
):
Bookmarks