'In a world where the first casualty of war is truth, journalism has become the new battleground.
'Peter Greste spent two decades reporting from the front line in the world’s most dangerous countries before making headlines himself following his own incarceration in an Egyptian prison. Charged with threatening national security, and enduring a sham trial, solitary confinement and detention for 400 days, Greste himself became a victim of the new global war on journalism.
'Wars have always been about propaganda but today’s battles are increasingly between ideas, and the media has become part of the battlefield. Extremists have staked a place in news dissemination with online postings, and journalists have moved from being witnesses to the struggle to a means by which the war is waged – which makes them a target. Having covered conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia, as well as having spent time in prison in Egypt, Greste is extremely well placed to describe in vivid detail what effect this has on the nature of reporting and the mind of the reporter.
'Based on extensive interviews and research, Greste shows how this war on journalism has spread to the West, not just in the murders at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo or the repressions of Putin’s Russia, but Australia’s metadata laws and Trump’s phony war on ‘fake news’.
'In this courageous, compelling, vital account Greste unpicks the extent to which modern investigative journalism is under threat, and the fraught quest – and desperate need – for truth in the age of terrorism.' (Publication summary)
The Correspondent
( dir. Kriv Stenders
)
Australia
:
Pop Family Entertainment
,
2024
28434848
2024
single work
film/TV
'Xmas Eve, 2014, in the shadow of the Great Pryamids of Egypt and Australian journalist, Peter Greste, is reporting from this most dangerous city on earth where bloody daily clashes between student revolutionaries and the government take place. No-one is safe. What Peter Greste doesn't know on that first night as he files his news across the globe is that he is the target and within a few hours he would be arrested, strip searched, despatched to a dungeon and accused of multiple crimes of terrorism, each one of which carried the death penalty. Welcome to Cairo.'
Source: Screen Australia.
Author's note: Between 9/11 2001 and July 2017, 1528 journalists were killed in the line of duty. This book is dedicated to all media workers who have given - or will give - their lives in pursuit of the truth.
Epigraph: 'the truth is always an abyss. One must - as in a swimming pool - dive from the quivering springboard of trivial, everyday experience, and sink into the depths in order to later rise again - laughing and fighting for breath to the now doubly illuminated surface of things.' - Franz Kafka, The Trial
'It’s a provocative title. Forty-two years ago, Phillip Knightley’s The First Casualty: From the Crimea to Vietnam: The war correspondent as hero, propagandist, and myth-maker (1975) kick-started a new field of media history. Knightley’s rollicking account of journalistic connivance with political and military power from the Crimean to the Gulf Wars spared his industry nothing. The fourth estate’s serial pursuit of national self-interest, its abandonment of objectivity, truth, and morality, revealed many of our most storied war reporters as grovelling servants of the powers that be, monsters of avarice and deception whose first duty was to their own wealth and preferment. If truth was the first casualty of war, principle was prominent among the collateral damage.' (Introduction)
'It’s a provocative title. Forty-two years ago, Phillip Knightley’s The First Casualty: From the Crimea to Vietnam: The war correspondent as hero, propagandist, and myth-maker (1975) kick-started a new field of media history. Knightley’s rollicking account of journalistic connivance with political and military power from the Crimean to the Gulf Wars spared his industry nothing. The fourth estate’s serial pursuit of national self-interest, its abandonment of objectivity, truth, and morality, revealed many of our most storied war reporters as grovelling servants of the powers that be, monsters of avarice and deception whose first duty was to their own wealth and preferment. If truth was the first casualty of war, principle was prominent among the collateral damage.' (Introduction)
