One of the great journalists of his era, and the man who revolutionized reporting about the Supreme Court, Anthony Lewis, died today from renal and heart failure. Lewis was 85.
Lewis reported on the Supreme Court for the New York Times first as correspondent and then later as a columnist. He later headed the Times bureau in London and wrote extensively on foreign policy issues.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03…
At the beginning of this month, I was reading “This Week in Blackness” and it highlighted a just onto the newsstands cover story from Philadelphia Magazine. A comment made by Adam B at Daily Kos:
It’s an embarrassing article
Take a look at Philadelphia Magazine’s masthead. Notice anything missing?
sort of summed up for me what I suspected.
I’ve often written about the bad side of journalism, and especially that of the Murdoch owned press, but just breaking is some shocking new of the noble sacrifices many journalists make in their attempts to report reality. A civil war which is rapidly becoming one of the bloodiest conflicts has claimed the life of the great Sunday Times journalist Marie Colvin. She was killed along with a photographer Remi Ochlik when the building she was staying in was shelled by Syrian government forces. The people who tried to escape were then targeted by rockets. Two other journalist were severely injured in the attack.
American born Colvin was the only journalist from a British paper in Syria, and has been described as the Martha Gellhorn of her generation. Witty, acerbic and fearless, only yesterday she filed reports for the BBC and CNN on the carnage in Homs.
“I watched a little baby die today,” she said. “Absolutely horrific.
“There is just shells, rockets and tank fire pouring into civilian areas of this city and it is just unrelenting.”
In a report published in the Sunday Times over the weekend, Colvin spoke of the citizens of Homs “waiting for a massacre”.
“The scale of human tragedy in the city is immense. The inhabitants are living in terror. Almost every family seems to have suffered the death or injury of a loved one,” she wrote.