At War: Reporting Under Fire: a Survey of a Century of War Correspondents

。 Stephen Farrell/The New York Times

MANCHESTER, England — Within a few hundred yards of each other in Old Trafford lie the Manchester United Football Club and the Imperial War Museum North. One is a monument to the global sport that unites continents and peoples, the other a monument to the study of forces that divide and despoil them.

Pass through the dagger-sharp, mirrored entrance of the Imperial War Museum North, and one of the first things you see inside are museum shop replicas of World War I and World War II military posters, and coffee mugs emblazoned with the British monarch’s crown and the even more British Churchill-era slogan “Keep Calm and Carry On.”

Stephen Farrell/The New York Times

Just a few yards farther and you are dragged straight into Bush- and Blair-era Iraq, with the crumpled, rusting hulk of a car that was destroyed by a marketplace bomb in Baghdad in 2007.

The museum covers wars since 1914, and the number and range of the exhibits from the past century puts into poignant context a quote by Martha Gellhorn that is framed in stark yellow and black in the museum’s latest exhibition, “War Correspondent: Reporting Under Fire since 1914.”

Stephen Farrell/The New York Times

The featured journalists are mostly British, although the exhibition also gives prominence to Ms. Gellhorn, an American who reported from the Spanish Civil War, and Alan Moorehead, an Australian who reported during World War II from the very same North African cities that feature in today’s headlines, including his entry to a ruined Benghazi on Christmas Day, 1941.

Indeed, what is most striking as you walk around the exhibition is the permanency of the themes. Ms. Gellhorn from 1937 Spain and her successors during the 1990s war in the Balkans made very similar observations about their drive for morality and truth rather than striving endlessly, and perhaps fruitlessly, for the appearance of absolute objectivity.

“We knew, we just knew, that Spain was the place to stop Fascism. That was it. It was one of those moments in history when there was no doubt,” says another of Ms. Gellhorn’s quoted remarks on the walls. And the many television screens embedded in the walls feature interviews with correspondents of a more recent era: Vaughan Smith of the Frontline news agency giving his assessment that “objective journalism isn’t wrong, it just needs to be identified and clearly packaged and labeled,” and Maggie O’Kane of The Guardian on her refusal while reporting from Sarajevo to equate documented human rights abuses on one side with unverifiable claims by spin doctors on the other.

Stephen Farrell/The New York Times

The methodology of the reporting changes almost beyond recognition — from handwritten scribbled notes with a censor’s blue marks to dispatches delivered live on satellite feeds.

Stephen Farrell/The New York Times

The terminology also changes over time. “Accredited” correspondents wearing military uniforms and epaulettes during World War II become “embedded” correspondents wearing “Press” flak jackets in the Persian Gulf.

Courtesy of Imperial War Museum North

However, the issues and problems remain constant: the struggle with censorship, the difficulty of balancing access to military commanders with control by them, the problem of identifying with the soldiers around you, the guilt of wearing helmets and bulletproof jackets while reporting from among civilians who do not have them, the struggle not to become inured to suffering and cynical in the face of abuses of power, the debate over whether to show graphic images of suffering, and perennial struggle to assess, minimize and justify the dangers involved in reporting from the front lines.

“A long career of risk-taking has taught me that gambles tend to come off: it’s the failure to take the plunge which you usually regret later,” opines John Simpson, the BBC’s world affairs editor. “You can’t take no risks,” is the blunter conclusion from one of his television colleagues.

The displays are certainly up-to-the-minute. They include mentions of Osama bin Laden’s death in Pakistan, and one contribution from a British television correspondent recorded on the roof of his hotel in the Libyan capital, Tripoli, during which he, somewhat glumly, illustrates the level of control that Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s government exerts over the Tripoli “pack” by pointing to the government-sanctioned transportation waiting in the parking lot for the next government-sanctioned photo opportunity.

Stephen Farrell/The New York Times

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the exhibition is the transition from a tone of almost sepia-tinged nostalgia during the early stages, to one of elegiac lament for what many of the participating correspondents regard as the imminent death of traditional war reporting.

That seems premature. Even a cursory glance at the changes on display, from the trenches of the Somme to a map of television correspondents embedded on D-Day in the Normandy landings, to Vietnam to Libya, would suggest that reporting — in some form or other — has survived profound technological, military and social changes.

Stephen Farrell/The New York Times

However the section on social media and phenomena such as “citizen journalism” is as fascinating as any of those that preceded it. Furthermore the exhibition is as multimedia in presentation as in content. There is a section on Salam Pax, the Baghdad blogger.

Large screens carry the opinions, expressed on Twitter, of visitors to the exhibition. Facebook responses are actively sought, and questions are also pasted to the floor as you walk around the museum, inviting written responses on cards offered just before the exit.

For more information on the exhibition, visit the museum’s Web site: Imperial War Museum North. Or follow the museum on Facebook or Twitter at @I_W_M. At War is also running a series about conflict journalism, Embedistan, giving the viewpoints of correspondents, photographers and others who have worked in Iraq and Afghanistan.

View the original article here

18 and Under: A Tonsil Remedy Is Fitted for a New Century

It opened on East 62nd Street in February 1921, its mission to remove the tonsils and adenoids of poor children on the East Side of Manhattan, thereby preventing sore throats and streptococcal infections and all their serious consequences in an era without antibiotics. Parents saw scarlet fever, named for its red, sandpapery rash, as a frightening and dangerous childhood illness; rheumatic fever, which sometimes followed strep, could seriously damage the heart.

But times have changed. Built on studies of throat infections and tonsillectomies, new guidelines from the American Academy of Otolaryngology, issued in January, suggest tonsillectomy for recurrent sore throats only if frequent or severe.

At the same time, the academy now recommends that the operation be considered for children who have trouble breathing while they sleep.

The new guidelines reflect changes in clinical practice, and attempt to bring scientific evidence to bear on an operation at times popular to the point of ubiquity.

In the era of the Tonsil Hospital, pretty much all children got tonsillectomies. Consider “Cheaper by the Dozen”: The 1948 memoir about two efficiency experts and their 12 children happens to contain the single funniest tonsillectomy chapter in literature (granted, competition is limited).

Six of the children undergo tonsillectomies, performed by a doctor in an operating room rigged in the family home in Montclair, N.J. The father of the family still has his tonsils, and the doctor is “rewarded” for his cooperation by being allowed to remove them, too.

Leaving aside all the family dynamics, the chapter is notable for the matter-of-fact assumption that sooner or later, all tonsils need to be removed. And even after antibiotics were available, many if not most tonsils continued to be removed, through the 1950s and ’60s.

“It was the single most common operation in the United States,” said Dr. Ellen Wald, a specialist in pediatric infectious disease who is chairwoman of the pediatrics department at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.

But which children really benefited from these operations, and which did not? “When I was in practice and first began to question this issue and was faced with the question of ‘Should my child have a tonsillectomy or not?,’ I never knew the right answer,” said Dr. Jack L. Paradise, professor emeritus of pediatrics at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

Dr. Paradise and his colleagues tried to provide an answer in a study, published in 1984, that looked at children with many well-documented episodes of throat infection (seven or more in the preceding year, for example). Those who got tonsillectomies had fewer infections in the first couple of years after surgery than those who didn’t, the researchers found. But the children who didn’t have surgery also had fewer and fewer infections as they got older.

Tonsillectomies were a reasonable option for children with severe, recurrent throat infections, Dr. Paradise concluded. But so was watchful waiting.

Later, Dr. Paradise studied children with fewer infections and concluded that the benefit of tonsillectomy was too “modest” to justify the risk, the pain and the cost of surgery in those children.

These days, many doctors are less likely to move to tonsillectomy for a smaller series of run-of-the-mill sore throats. I try to explain to parents that their children will grow out of these infections, and taking out their tonsils won’t necessarily do very much to expedite that process.

Yet at the same time, doctors are more willing to consider that children may need the operation if their tonsils obstruct the throat enough to affect breathing while they sleep.

Dr. Richard M. Rosenfeld, one of the authors of the new tonsillectomy guidelines and a professor of otolaryngology at SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, suggests that back when most children had their tonsils out, it was perhaps less common to see these sleep problems — what with all the tonsillectomies, there was “nobody breathing with a golf ball in the mouth.”

Now that more children are growing up with their tonsils intact, he said, “we created this new disease, sleep-disordered breathing.”

Some behavioral issues, including some attention problems, can be traced to a lack of deep, restful sleep. A child suffering from obstructive sleep apnea will not simply grow out of it, said Dr. Kasey Li, a surgeon at Stanford University. Even if the tonsils do become less problematic at puberty, as sometimes happens, the child’s development will have been affected.

For problems short of obstructive sleep apnea, “the advice to parents is, if you’re even the least bit unsure, don’t do it — it’s an elective surgery, don’t worry about it, you can always re-address it,” Dr. Rosenfeld said. “There’s very little harm to some watchful waiting till things sort themselves out.”

Parents should also know that in a significant number of children, the breathing problems — and everything that follows from disordered sleep — may persist even after the operation and need further treatment.

So the tonsillectomy, once routine, now requires a nuanced diagnosis. It may improve quality of life for some children, but there are limits to what it can accomplish — with sleep issues and behavior problems, and with recurrent infections.

It’s a far cry from where we were in the first half of the 20th century, when philanthropists provided poor children with a dedicated facility for tonsil removal. The Tonsil Hospital closed in 1946.

“I’m on the Upper East Side at Cornell New York hospital, 10 blocks from where the original hospital was," said Dr. Edward McCoul, an otolaryngologist who wrote about the hospital last year in a medical journal. “I ask around, and basically no one I’ve mentioned it to has ever heard of it.”

 

Power of RSS for 21st Century Educators

Philosophies regarding social media networks, such as Twitter, can vary greatly. But similar to email, an unspoken etiquette has emerged for these social websites as well. The etiquette for these social sites does not consist of hard and fast rules, but is simply a list of guidelines for posting. The following is a set of Twitter etiquette guidelines, but can also be applied to other social networks...
Twitequette
To create an RSS feed in Bing, conduct a search, and at the end of the URL from the search results screen add the following text: &format=rss
The IBM Press Room lets you create custom RSS feeds that combine several categories. To create a custom feed, select categories below
RSS2Java source for easily adding RSS feeds to your website. The The service is free of charge. A JavaScript code will be generated and needs to be plugged into your website.
Information overload is less about having too much information and more about not having the right tools and techniques to filter and process information to find the pieces that are most relevant for you. This presentation will focus on showing you a variety of tips and techniques to get you started down the path of looking at RSS feeds in a completely different light.
Filtering RSS Feeds
Malatya is a new rss directory for blogs and RSS feeds.
New Feed Directory - FeedFairyFeedFairy.com is an easy to use and free RSS feed directory. Just submit your RSS feed and FeedFairy.com will publish and distribute it for free.
Pros and Cons for Web TemplatesSmall retail businesses who are making the move to an online presence may feel overwhelmed by the process of creating a website. Web templates can often help make the process less painful for a small business. To assist webmasters in the template vs custom design decision, we have outlined the pros and cons to each...
Pros and Cons for Web Templates
Podcasts offer a great way to learn and stay on top of just about any topic. In the classroom, students can listen to podcasts as a group and add their own comments and questions to the program. Make podcasts an integral part of your classroom experience with the help of this collection of podcasts.
80 Podcasts for the Classroom
How to Submit Podcasts to iTunes Music Store
Whenever you buy a brand new product right when it hits the market, the safety of that product is always a concern. That is particularly true when the product, like childrens toys or a new car, can have a direct impact on the health and safety of your own family. Rather than trying to constantly check for any recall announcements for every single product you’ve bought that could pose a safety concern if it malfunctions, it is much easier to just sign up for product recall RSS feeds and then just keep an eye out for any recall alerts that might affect you.
The 8 Best Sources For Product Recall RSS Updates
14 Tips to Make the Most of RSS FeedsAs a busy digital marketer, I live or die by feeds. Feeds keep me up to date and push my content, fast. And as a blogger, I similarly depend on feeds to keep me informed and spread influence.
To be successful you need to be more than simply informed -- you need to be a thought leader and agenda-setter rather than another voice in the echo chamber. But feeds are at a disadvantage on this front, as a headline that appears on a feed must have already been written about.
The goal then is to use feeds, as quickly as possible, to ensure that you're among the first writing about a topic.
14 Tips to Make the Most of Feeds
Diggs unpopular version 4 redesign last summer has put a big damper on the sites traffic, but the Digg team has come around and started to make changes that are helping to bring users back. The latest smart move: banning RSS feed submissions. No longer can every single post from a site be auto-submitted to Digg via RSS.
Digg Bans RSS Submissions
Splush enables editors to share with their audience, real-time updated content from partners, friends or favorites information sources. A dynamic blogroll and multimedia access make RSS Feeds accessible to all without any technical constraints.
Splush is also FeedAds : the first ads service of sponsored links 2.0 where traditional statistic links are replaced by more attractive ones updated in real time, with direct link to content and multimedia.
Looking for RSS Tools or Podcasting Tools?
The Internet has become a highly interactive medium. In order to participate in discussion forums and newsgroups, it is important to be familiar with standard and accepted Internet forum etiquette. Here are some tips to help make your forum participation more productive and beneficial...
1. Terms-Of-Service
Read the forum rules and terms-of-service before you begin posting. This way, you can avoid having your introduction to the forum being an accidental breaking of a rule or other misconduct.
Forum Etiquette
Dapper is a tool that enables users to create update feeds for their favorite sites and website owners to optimize and distribute their content in new ways.
Importance Of Good Headlines For Feed SubscribersContrary to what you may think, people who subscribe to your feed aren’t necessarily reading your articles. In most cases your posts will be competing with a large amount of content, some of which may be very similar to your own.
I do almost all of my reading through a feed reader and there is a habit I’ve picked up which I think is symptomatic of most feed subscribers. With so many new articles popping up in my feed reader every day I can not possibly read all of them to completion. I tend to prioritize by title, then skim a little, and if my curiosity is peaked, the article gets my full attention.
Increase RSS Subscribers
30 Simple Ways to Gain RSS SubscribersBefore creeping into the ways, you must also remember that your content must be really good as Content is the King. It is recommended to read the following few posts which will help you to shape your self in terms of contents and its promotions,
Increase RSS Subscribers
RSSMore is a free rss screensaver that lets you subscribe to any number of RSS/XML feeds and view them in your rss screen saver.
Digital Sound Effects is a new portal that contains thousands of sound effects. The Digital Sound Effects collection contains royalty free sound effects that can be used as introductions, extros or a background in any digital audio or video productions including podcasts. The Digital Sound Effects website contains a wide array of sound effects that range from realistic car crashes with screeching brakes to soothing nature sound effects.
Each sound effect is available as a download in a zip file. The zip file contains the sound effect in an MP3, Wav, and WMA format. All effects contained on digital-sound-effects.com are all royalty free which means they can be downloaded and used without the broadcaster having to pay royalties for the use of the sound effect. The broadcaster or publisher pays a single fee and are able to use effects in any capacity that they choose.The sound effects can be used on websites, podcast productions or in any other format.
Digital Sound Effects
Three Ways to Prevent People From UnsubscribingGetting traffic to your blog and turning your visitors into loyal readers requires a lot more than just writing new blog posts. What you must do is create an environment so people want to return, and if you can turn them into RSS subscribers, then you will be that much more powerful. Sometimes when we make our content pages we can easily look sight of the fact that we are not really making them for us, we are making them for our visitors and site readers. Ok, we want you to get some RSS subscribers because it can be very helpful to have them, and we would like for you to continue reading so you can find out some great approaches for doing that.
3 Ways to Stop People From Unsubscribing
Delightfulblogs is a human-reviewed blog directory where you can promote your blog to get more traffic.
Are you looking for a tool to automate the submission of RSS feeds? Checkout RSS Submit
Coming up with ideas for new blog posts on a regular basis can be a challenge, even for the most prolific writers. Experience shows that readers tend to favor certain types of posts more than others. Here are some popular types of blog posts that you might want to use for those times when inspiration simply does not strike.
Tips for Blog Posting
What is Hot What is Not in Technology for 2011What is Hot
1. Virtual Cloud
2. Mobile Apps
3. Virtual Technology
4. Connectivity
5. Scalability
What is Not
1. Privacy
2. Social Noise
3. Transparency
4. Regulation
5. Land Lines
Read more about What is Hot and What is Not in Technology for 2011
Motivational Quotes of the Day RSS
RSS and RSS Readers Alive and WellI agree:
A brush fire has been swirling through the blogosphere of late over whether RSS is dead, dying, or possibly severely injured and in need of assistance. It seems to have started with a post from UK-based web designer Kroc Camen that got picked up by Hacker News and re-tweeted a lot. The flames were fanned by a blog post from TechCrunch that drove RSS developer Dave Winer into a bit of a Twitter frenzy. But is RSS actually doomed, or even ailing? Not really. Like plenty of other technologies, it is just becoming part of the plumbing of the real-time web.

complete article
FeedStomper - Turn an overactive feed that clutters up your RSS reader into a regular, once-a-day summary feed.
rss2email is a small Python utility that sends out nicely formatted emails from RSS feed postings. Why would you want such a thing? Well, many people still use email as their primary communications tool and don’t want to be bothered with RSS. Also, if you are on the go and are using a mobile device, it is often easier to be buzzed by push email than it is to configure a mobile RSS reader.
Generate An Embeddable Widget From RSS Feeds using Feed Wind. You can easily keep in touch with a site through its RSS feed. But what if you want another sites updates to appear on your own blogs or websites?
Reminder: New years is a great time to prune your RSS feeds that have grown excessively long!
Best Way to Consume News in 2010We consumed a lot of news in 2010. But how did we consume it? On your tiny iPhone screen? Hopefully not. The best way to consume news this year was in a socially curated, real-time fashion with big pretty pictures and video.
Best Way to Consume News in 2010
Ten newsroom New Years resolutions for 2011It is time for our annual list of things your newsroom needs to do online. Some of these are repeats – and that’s because they’re still relevant to many newsrooms. There is no pie in the sky stuff here; just steps you should take that are relatively cheap and painless. Happy New Year from Lost Remote.
1. Build a mobile version of your site.
2. 2. Get an app version of your site.
3. Do a Skype video remote.
complete list of 10 Newsroom Resolutions
10 Useful RSS-Tricks and Hacks For WordPressLets take a look at 10 useful, yet rather unknown RSS-tricks for WordPress. Each section of the article presents a problem, suggests a solution and provides you with an explanation of the solution, so that you can not just solve some of your RSS-related problems but also understand what you are actually doing. Thus, you can make sure your WordPress theme remains under your control and is not bloated with some obscure source code.
10 Useful RSS-Tricks and Hacks For WordPress
Methods to Aquire RSS SubscribersRSS or Really Simple Syndication has become a primary way to gain new subscribers and grow your list. The best way to get a larger RSS subscription base is to follow the three tips below.
There are different kinds of tools you can use to encourage people to subscribe to your RSS feed. Here we are referring to the MyBlogLog Widget and how it can help you increase your subscribers. You would be surprised at the percentages of people who will respond favorably to a request to perform some kind of desired action. There are a number of reasons why they may have not including a lack of knowledge about how to do it, or what they need, etc.
Methods to Aquire RSS
- RSS Specification Feed created by FeedForAll
Blog Post Archive
Current Blog
2011
March 2011 Blog
February 2011 Blog
January 2011 Blog
2010December 2010 Blog
November 2010 Blog
October 2010 Blog
September 2010 Blog
August 2010 Blog
July 2010 Blog
June 2010 Blog
May 2010 Blog
April 2010 Blog
March 2010 Blog
February 2010 Blog
January 2010 Blog
2009
December 2009 Blog
November 2009 Blog
October 2009 Blog
September 2009 Blog
August 2009 Blog
July 2009 Blog
June 2009 Blog
May 2009 Blog
April 2009 Blog
March 2009 Blog
February 2009 Blog
January 2009 Blog
2008December 2008 Blog
November 2008 Blog
October 2008 Blog
September 2008 Blog
August 2008 Blog
July 2008 Blog
May - June 2008 RSS Blog
April 2008 RSS Blog
March 2008 RSS Blog
February 2008 RSS Blog
January 2008 RSS Blog
2007
December 2007 RSS Blog
November 2007 RSS Blog
October 2007 RSS Blog
September 2007 RSS Blog
August 2007 RSS Blog
July 2007 RSS Blog
June 2007 RSS Blog
May 2007 RSS Blog
April 2007 RSS Blog
March 2007 RSS Blog
February 2007 RSS Blog
January 2007 RSS Blog
2006
December 2006 RSS Blog
November 2006 RSS Blog
October 2006 Blog
September 2006 Blog
August 2006 Blog
July 2006 Blog
June 2006 Blog
May 2006 Blog
April 2006 Blog
March 2006 Blog
February 2006 Blog
January 2006 Blog
2005
December 2005 Blog
November 2005 Blog
October 2005 Blog
September 2005 Blog
August 2005 Blog
July 2005 Blog
June 2005 Blog
May 2005 Blog
April 2005 Blog
March 2005 Blog
February 2005 Blog
January 2005 Blog
2004
December 2004 Blog
November 2004 Blog
October 2004 Blog
September 2004 Blog
August 2004 Blog
View the original article here