Guest Post by Patrick Gathara At the end of my first term in high school, I watched a screening of Steven Spielberg’s Poltergeist, the tale of an ordinary family unknowingly living in a house built over a graveyard without the bother of moving the bodies. Of course, this does not go down well with the […]
There are times we shake our heads or roll our eyes. When we could not invent some of the things that we spot in the media. For some reason especially New York Times journalists can’t help themselves (though there are some exceptions like Lydia Polgreen reporting from Johannesburg). For example, former Times editor Bill Keller […]
We couldn’t let the week pass without celebrating one of its more significant events: Jeffrey Gettleman, East Africa correspondent for The New York Times (yes, only in Africa can journalists cover territories so vast) was awarded a Pulitzer Prize–valued at $10,000–for “his vivid reports, often at personal peril, on famine and conflict in East Africa.” […]
Chief among the debates (or what passes for debates on blogs, Twitter and in mainstream media) about #Kony2012, are these two questions: whether or not external observers should raise awareness or otherwise stage interventions in a conflict zone, and if so, how interventions should be carried out. While it is clear that Elliot Ross (on this […]
By Abdourahman Waberi* Jeffrey Gettleman will not run the risk of being seen as ‘a nobody, a cockroach, a gangster,’ unlike the Somali pirates he depicted in the columns of the New York Times Magazine last weekend (‘Taken by Pirates‘, Oct 5, 2011). In that particular piece of reportage, a totally asymmetric treatment is set […]
While we were on vacation this past summer, something big happened. Many of you no doubt have heard by now of the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights’ mapping report, which, among other things, details the human rights abuses committed by Rwandan troops against Hutu refugees in then-Zaire in 1996-1997. The […]
It’s Friday so here’s some links and stories I have managed not to give the proper treatment to this week. * What’s Jeffrey Gettleman problem? This week he has a story in The New York Times about Somalia’s Radio Mogadishu, “the one and only relatively free radio station in south central Somalia where journalists can […]
Jeffrey Gettleman of the New York Times strikes again. Last month anger resounded across the blogosphere after a bizarre rant by Gettleman appeared in Foreign Policy. In the piece, “Africa’s Forever Wars: Why the continent’s conflicts never end,” the NYTimes East Africa bureau chief gave us his opinion on ending the ‘forever wars’: “capture or […]
Jeffrey Gettleman, the New York Times correspondent in East Africa (who seem to report about nothing else but violence, war and death) has a harrowing piece in today’s paper about increasing rape of men by men in eastern Congo. Quoting Oxfam, Human Rights Watch, United Nations officials and several Congolese aid organizations, as well as […]
