“The hardest, bitterest thing about being a journalist is that you see events as they unfold. You see history as it might still be changed, wars as they might still be stopped. Seen in close-up, everything looks more complex, more ambiguous, and sometimes the more you know, the less you understand. But if you talk, and talk and talk with as many people as you can, if you stay in the world’s veins, in the end you always get an idea of what’s happening.”
– Remembering journalist Anthony Shadid
“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
–
Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho (via wordsnquotes)
So fitting. CPJ denied UN ECOSOC accreditation today after 4 years of
Kafka-esqe bureaucratic limbo.
What does this mean? The NGO Committee of the United Nations voted today to deny us consultative status with the Economic Social Council (ECOSOC). Without such status, we are unable to access U.N. bodies and processes, notably the Human Rights Council in Geneva, where accredited NGOs can deliver a counter-narrative to states. During today’s vote, six members voted in favor of CPJ’s application, 10 voted against CPJ, and three abstained. The full list of countries that voted against us is here.
“The spread of social media, and technologies such as camera phones, have given us the unprecedented ability to create and send huge amounts of data all over the world almost instantaneously. It has also meant that the trusted sources of news are no longer just governments or the mainstream media, but include a much wider range of actors, including private citizens posting on sites such as LiveLeak. In some ways this has furthered the cause of transparency, as individual citizens have a greater capability to examine and expose government actions, yet it also allows private citizens to produce false and misleading information.”
– Nick Waters, Bellingcat
“[The] biggest and least talked about development in traditional print media as it converts to digital is: It now has ratings, just as television does.”
– JIM RUTENBERG in the New York Times
“You’re bearing witness helplessly to something which everybody knows and nobody wants to face.”
– James Baldwin
“I never did go back to Iraq- but I later spent time in Afghanistan, Gaza, and other conflict zones, reporting on war, trauma—and what comes after. I carry all of it with me all the time. I know how alluring and exhilarating that sort of reporting can be, and I know what it feels like later, when you can’t sleep, can’t concentrate, and struggle to relate to people in your life, including those who love you.”
– Phil Zabriskie
“If I speak, I am condemned.
If I stay silent, I am damned!”
– Victor Hugo
“We enter the bookstore, see the many volumes arrayed there, and think: so much to read, so little time. But books do not take time; they give time.”
by Arnold Weinstein for the Nytimes:
Don’t Turn Away From the Art of Life
“I am so heavy with words I sometimes wonder how I can move, shackled to the ground with the weight of what I cannot say”
– queenrinacat (via wnq-writers)
“Let me illustrate the size of our suffering. This beautiful city, New York, has a population of about eight and a half million people. Imagine that more than two million people were forced to flee and the city had no teachers, doctors, postal workers.”
– Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently, recipients of CPJ’s 2015 International Press Freedom Award
