Archived Writing

<< back to the search results

Giving their all

Thursday, October 12, 2006

Journalism has given me a lot, I concluded this week in a reflective mood, brought on by another birthday. But some people, I thought, give journalism a lot - even their very lives.

Thanks to CNN I’d seen journalists turn out in force at the Moscow funeral of Anna Politkovskaya (pictured), the brave Novaya Gazeta reporter who campaigned to expose, among many horrors, Russian kidnapping and torture (in another context it might be called "extraordinary rendition") of terrorism suspects.

Politkovskaya's killing, shot four times in her own apartment building with a Makarov pistol left lying beside her (a signature of Moscow’s all-too-common contract murders) came as a shock but no real surprise. She herself had told the BBC, in the terse article-less English of a Slavic language speaker "Risk is usual. Part of my job. Job of Russian journalist". A Canadian colleague and friend said she carried out that job "brazenly and fearlessly".

She was unique but by no means alone. Thirteen journalists have been killed in Russia since President Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000.

And internationally, too, the death-toll of media workers continues unabated. On the same day as Politskovskaya, two German journalists, Karen Fischer and Christian Struwe of the Deutsche Welle broadcast network were also killed - far away in war-ravaged Afghanistan.

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists reckons, even with its notably careful and conservative form of assessment, that 234 journalists have been killed worldwide in the years since 2001, compared with 187 in a similar period running up to that watershed year.

Most died in the line of duty in a war, but the other category is that to which Politkovskaya almost certainly belongs - death at the hands of repressive authority.

In the worst case, that of Iraq, the 130 or more media deaths since the 2003 invasion now outnumber those in either World War Two or Vietnam. And to make matters worse, journalism’s two deadliest threats are getting ever more disastrously entwined. As well as bombs, snipers, or sectarian killer gangs, reporters increasingly have to be wary of Nuri al-Maliki's government as well, in all its flailing heavy-handedness. New laws are setting out to criminalize much free speech, and a journalist can now be jailed if he or she "publicly insults" the government or public officials.

This is hardly the more open society that we (arguably) went to war for, and it is certainly not what journalists around the world are giving their lives for.

THE DIGIRATI ARE STILL TRYING to sound wise and insightful about Google’s extraordinarily expensive acquisition of YouTube.com, which I heard one industry cynic describe as “just a vast collection of three-minute-and-under amateur videos”.

The not-quite-one-year-old site’s video-sharing platform is undoubtedly impressive. It’s clean, fast and easy to use, just like its new parent’s search engine. But is it worth $1.65 billion? Merrill Lynch, who we might expect to know the value of everything, estimate that Google wouldn’t have paid more than $100 million for the technology alone. It’s the vast audience, about 34 million, that Google was clearly coughing up for.

To many, Rupert Murdoch’s News International seemed profligate when last year it paid $580 million (now a rather paltry sum, don’t you think?) for MySpace.com. I recall an oddly slow-witted British reporter asking Murdoch how he possibly intended to make money out of a web venue where young people simply hung out virtually and shared their interests. There was a memorable pause before the down-to-earth magnate said simply: “Selling advertising”.

Look out for Google placing 15- and 30-second pre-roll commercials onto those otherwise innocent videos at YouTube. And for the largely youthful audience deciding whether it’s riled or entertained by the intrusion.

WHILE ONE QUEEN (Elizabeth II, in Stephen Frears’ searching movie) opened the New York Film Festival, another queen draws it toward a close tomorrow night.

In Sofia Coppola’s deliberately anachronistic bio-flick Marie Antoinette, the teenager plucked from a relatively quiet Austro-Hungarian palace to be the epicenter of Louis XVI’s luxuriant court is filmically feted with 1980s music more than 1780s. Bow Wow Wow’s “Fools Rush In” and “I Want Candy” seem apt accompaniment to the Princess Diana / rock-star composite played by Kirsten Dunst, who has of course to mouth (with heavy underlining) the words: “Let them eat cake”.

But it was here, with the cake theme, that Coppola’s blithe time-shifting left me behind. The film’s palette is strongly influenced by the pastel-colored macarons for which the Ladurée patisserie in Paris is rightly famous. And those glorious delicacies themselves feature significantly in Coppola's riotous scenes of conspicuous consumption.

Sorry to be a stickler for detail, but - as any real cake enthusiast knows - macarons in Louis XVI’s time would have been the traditional flat-base kind from Nancy in northern France, not Ladurée’s sandwich-like variety, invented in the early twentieth century.

It’s fun sometimes to be a pedant.