'Why Fixers Who Help War Correspondents Deserve More Credit - And to Tell Their Own Stories'
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It was as I was reading the horrifying details of the Afghan data leak that I got the alert. 'BBC BREAKING NEWS: Thousands of Afghans relocated to UK under secret government scheme after defence data breach'.
In a second, the BBC had taken a story about the UK endangering tens of thousands of Afghans - many of whom had worked for the British army - and made it a story about migrants breaching our borders. They had taken a story about the Government covering up its own mistake, and spun it into a woke refugee resettlement conspiracy!
So look. My uni history thesis re-examined accounts of colonial wars fought hundreds of years ago. I used local diaries to fact-check histories written by Western academics. But I shouldn't have wasted my time crawling through archives - I could have run the same study on this week's headlines. The racist and colonialist rewriting of warfare is still alive and well. Which brings us to today's Media Storm: war reporting.
'MPs and the Media Cast Benefit-Claimants as Freeloaders - This Discrimination Is What Keeps Them Out of Work'
The media has gone on the attack after the welfare U-Turn, but they're not telling the real story, argues Mathilda Mallinson
Mathilda Mallinson
CNN's chief international anchor, Christiane Amanpour, had to be corrected live on air by The Daily Show's Jon Stewart when she said: "Our major problem covering Israel-Gaza is that… journalists are not on the ground in Gaza."
She had meant to condemn Israel's ban on international journalists - instead, she condemned herself. There are, of course, journalists on the ground in Gaza, and more of them have been murdered than in any other war on record.
The far more accurate diagnosis of the problem came from one of them, Hossam Shabat: "The problem is not Western journalists being unable to enter, but the fact that Western media doesn't respect and value Palestinian journalists."
Local reporters are often overlooked (even without a strategised campaign to smear them all as Hamas operatives), but the hidden hierarchies of war reporting run deeper.
I first heard the term 'fixer' during my journalism Masters. Yet I had met a fixer before, while working in the refugee camps on France's UK-facing coast. He was an Afghan man and had worked for British journalists covering their army's invasion of his country.
When he became targeted by the Taliban as a "collaborator for the enemy", he fled. The fixer told me this story after arriving in Dunkirk in the middle of that harsh 2017 winter, and I added his name to my 'try find him a tent' list.
'Supreme Court Gender Decision Achieved Nothing and Was a Waste Of Money'
Eleven weeks after the ruling, Mathilda Mallinson and Helena Wadia tear it apart and explain how the media is making matters worse
Packed with exclusive investigations, analysis, and features
SUBSCRIBE TODAY
It was as I was reading the horrifying details of the Afghan data leak that I got the alert. 'BBC BREAKING NEWS: Thousands of Afghans relocated to UK under secret government scheme after defence data breach'.
In a second, the BBC had taken a story about the UK endangering tens of thousands of Afghans - many of whom had worked for the British army - and made it a story about migrants breaching our borders. They had taken a story about the Government covering up its own mistake, and spun it into a woke refugee resettlement conspiracy!
So look. My uni history thesis re-examined accounts of colonial wars fought hundreds of years ago. I used local diaries to fact-check histories written by Western academics. But I shouldn't have wasted my time crawling through archives - I could have run the same study on this week's headlines. The racist and colonialist rewriting of warfare is still alive and well. Which brings us to today's Media Storm: war reporting.
'MPs and the Media Cast Benefit-Claimants as Freeloaders - This Discrimination Is What Keeps Them Out of Work'
The media has gone on the attack after the welfare U-Turn, but they're not telling the real story, argues Mathilda Mallinson
Mathilda Mallinson
CNN's chief international anchor, Christiane Amanpour, had to be corrected live on air by The Daily Show's Jon Stewart when she said: "Our major problem covering Israel-Gaza is that… journalists are not on the ground in Gaza."
She had meant to condemn Israel's ban on international journalists - instead, she condemned herself. There are, of course, journalists on the ground in Gaza, and more of them have been murdered than in any other war on record.
The far more accurate diagnosis of the problem came from one of them, Hossam Shabat: "The problem is not Western journalists being unable to enter, but the fact that Western media doesn't respect and value Palestinian journalists."
Local reporters are often overlooked (even without a strategised campaign to smear them all as Hamas operatives), but the hidden hierarchies of war reporting run deeper.
I first heard the term 'fixer' during my journalism Masters. Yet I had met a fixer before, while working in the refugee camps on France's UK-facing coast. He was an Afghan man and had worked for British journalists covering their army's invasion of his country.
When he became targeted by the Taliban as a "collaborator for the enemy", he fled. The fixer told me this story after arriving in Dunkirk in the middle of that harsh 2017 winter, and I added his name to my 'try find him a tent' list.
'Supreme Court Gender Decision Achieved Nothing and Was a Waste Of Money'
Eleven weeks after the ruling, Mathilda Mallinson and Helena Wadia tear it apart and explain how the media is making matters worse
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