October 01, 2003
A Reporter's Mission - and Its Occasional Price
Four American journalists who died while covering the war in Iraq and another who was slain in Pakistan were honored today in a ceremony on a Civil War battlefield in Maryland - Michael Kelly of the Atlantic, Elizabeth Neuffer of the Boston Globe, David Bloom of NBC, Mark Fineman of the Los Angeles Times and Daniel Pearl of the Wall Street Journal.
In their deaths, Baltimore Sun writer David Folkenflik see journalism's larger purpose: "At the heart of the work of those correspondents is the fundamental mission that should be common to all reporters: discerning the truth and then airing it, even when it might offend the sensibilities of the powerful."
Remember.
Links
Baltimore Sun, David Folkenflik Recalling journalists who died in conflict
Indeed, price of freedom is higher than we like to admit...
Emil Fackenheim:
Thinking through radical evil
Sometimes life goes to school with philosophy, sometimes philosophy goes to school with life.
The first thing one noticed about him was his accent. It, like him, was one of a kind. It was a mix of guttural German and the brogueish, Scottish English he picked up in Aberdeen. His speech was punctuated by Yiddishisms, Hebrew, Greek and Arabic. Since he learned most of his English reading P.G. Woodhouse, who wrote about aristocrats, he would often unconsciously insert a posh phrase such as Right-O, which sounded funny coming from such a man of the people.
In God's Presence in History, he proposed his 614th commandment, for Jews to follow: Never grant Hitler a posthumous victory. The Holocaust may be incomprehensible, but Jews could refuse to collude with the Hitlerian goal of ending their 4,000-year history.
· http://www.nationalpost.com/review/story.html?id=62206949-D87A-4A04-9F1E-3B8830B59293 [ ] [National Post]