caravia/journalism

I am a bit busy at the moment because I am hosting together with my colleagues at the board of the Swedish Pen Club, pensweden.org [pensweden.org]
the Mexican journalist and writer Lydia Cacho. Lydia is one of the most courageus women I know, as a journalist and writer she is denouncing the corruption and the greed in the mexican society, how the drugbarons and the organized crime work together using women and children as they were commodities. Children and women are trafficked for sex, for organs, harvested as animals.
She was imprisoned and tortured and she survived for a miracle, now she got the Tucholsky prize, a prize we in the Swedish Pen gives in memory of the Jewish German writer Kurt Tucholsky who fled to Sweden from Nazi Germany 1943.

An excellent journalistic initiative from some developing countries wanting to etablish a new kind of rapporting.

Interesting article about old media versus new media, how magazines and newspapers are challenged by blogs and communities making their own news. Inspiring and scary, as all changes are.

Excellent initiative of citizen journalistic made by professionals and teachers.

A wonderful piece of Robert Fisk writing, chasing the forger of a book about Saadam Hussein he didn't write.

"It arrived for me in Beirut under plain cover, a brown envelope containing a small, glossy paperback in Arabic, accompanied by a note from an Egyptian friend. "Robert!" it began. "Did you really write this?"

The front cover bore a photograph of Saddam Hussein in the dock in Baghdad, the left side of his head in colour, the right side bleached out, wearing a black sports jacket but with no tie, holding a Koran in his right hand. "Saddam Hussein," the cover said in huge letters. "From Birth to Martyrdom." And then there was the author's name - in beautiful, calligraphic typeface and in gold in the top, right-hand corner. "By Robert Fisk."

So there it was, 272 paperback pages on the life and times of the Hitler of Baghdad and selling very well in the Egyptian capital. "We all suspect a well-known man here," she added. "His name is Magdi Chukri."

Needless to say, I noticed one or two problems with this book. It took a very lenient view of the brutality of Saddam, it didn't seem to care much about the gassed civilians of Halabja - and it was full of the kind of purple passages which I loathe. "After the American rejection of the Iraqi weapons report to the UN," 'Robert Fisk' wrote, "the beating of war drums turned into a cacophony..."

Dare I suggest to readers that this kind of cliche doesn't sound like Robert Fisk? The only war drums I could hear were those of my own astonishment. For I never wrote this book. It wasn't plagiarism - a common practice in Cairo, which is why I ensure that all my real books are legally published in Arabic in Lebanon. No, this wasn't plagiarism. This was forgery."

Art Magazine from Austria.