Re: <nettime> War profiteers in art (Biennale di Venezia, 2007)

["Benjamin Geer" <benjamin.geer@gmail.com>]

On 11/06/07, Ana Peraica <ana.peraica@st.htnet.hr> wrote:

> I am thinking again on the role of the war reporter that has emancipated
> indicating a cultural need for the distant trauma in public

Sometimes it's not so distant.  People in Iraq do watch TV news
reports about the war going on around them.

> It indeed reminded me of plenty of conferences on war topics in which
> speakers were "caught in war" for a day, having all kinds of
> bullet-protection jackets and who had only made troubles to local police that
> had to cover them up instead of taking care for children, old people and
> women in danger that would not be able to escape, as these "reporters"

A lot of reporters have been killed in Iraq, and quite a few of them
have been Iraqis:

http://www.rsf.org/special_iraq_en.php3

To get a sense of why some journalists risk their lives to cover wars,
you could have a look at the BBC documentary "Control Room", about
Al-Jazeera's coverage of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, perhaps especially
the part about Al-Jazeera journalist Tariq Ayyoub, who was killed by
an American air strike on the Al Jazeera office in Baghdad, and the
statement by his widow, in which she implores a gathering of
journalists to persist in telling the truth about the war.

Ben


#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net