In 2004, NBC News correspondent Kevin Sites offered the world a shocking glimpse into the Iraq war, when he released footage to the media of a U.S. Marine shoot and kill an unarmed, dying man in a Fallujah mosque. He was both criticized and praised for filming the incident. During this time, Kevin Sites’s blog became a reliable source of the daily action in Iraq, when many networks had stopped sending reporters there and offered only snippets of information about the war's progress.
Through his experience in covering war zones around the world, Sites has customized a reporting style coined solo journalism (“SoJo”) and provides to his readers a continued, up-close perspective of war conflict in third world countries. Most Americans are not informed about the situations that emerge in a war conflict or the actions that take place in countries that have unstable governments. Sites offers an unedited look into these places and conditions.
Sites visited the USC campus on March 20, 2007 and spoke to students at the Annenberg School for Communication. He shared his vision with students about the future of news reporting, since having become Yahoo! News’s first featured reporter.
Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone is a Yahoo-sponsored news site dedicated to Sites’s third world journeys and transports multimedia news reporting into the American mainstream media. When Sites visits war zones, he is responsible for writing and shooting the footage, which he then sends back to Yahoo! electronically, and by satellite. One of the goals of Sites’s Yahoo!-sponsored site is to get people involved in discussions about current world conflicts. By reporting some of the narratives of people caught up in war events, the site hopes to put a human face on war and bring Americans closer to the people involved in these conflicts.
“22 different conflict zones, 19 different countries, 3,000 pictures posted, 153 dispatches, and something like 130 video clips,” is how Sites described his activities in one year.
He risks his life to supply the American public with solid information about world conflicts. In the process, he has been called a traitor. But is our system of democracy an Establishment or an avenue of active-participation where people like Sites should travel? When we stop talking and allow political elites to debate our country’s decisions, what is democracy then? These are questions that Sites’s form of news reporting might address in an often compliant American political climate.
7 comments:
After reading this post, I found solo journalism to be a promising venue for releasing information that might otherwise be never known to the general public. It is good to know that there are still journalists who are committed to reporting real news without censorship. Additionally, I agree that Kevin Sites should not be regarded as a traitor simply because he shows the human rights violations that US Marines are committing in Iraq. The public has the right to know how the war is progressing. Overall, I found your post very interesting and engaging.
This is a great source! I have great admiration for people like him and his crew to deliver unedited truth, unafraid risking their lives, criticisms or being called a traitor (which they are not). News source like BBC and CNN are important, but we need more sites like this, so people around the world have a better idea of what's going on in the "Hot Zones," or like you mentioned, to "bring Americans closer to the people involved in these conflicts" through non-mainstream sources like this one. When I saw the videos on this site, I saw them differently from the ones I see on CNN or other mainstream sources. It may be because I have admiration for Site and his crew's dedication and goals to deliver the truth, and only the truth. Thanks for sharing :)
I think sometimes people are too quick to judge these brave men that have to be in the war. My brother is a Marine, when he first enrolled, he was supposed to go for training that would only last 3 months and was going to go right to Iraq. These men are not fully psychologically trained to be in these situations. Then again, would any of us ever be ready to be in these horrendous conditions of "kill or be killed?" It is a shame that after our men put their lives on the line, they are reprimanded for taking actions and put in situations that they are not ready to handle. At the same time, I wonder about these politicians who promote the war. I once saw a protester against the war say that he does not support a war that the president will not put his own children in. That made me think of the people who are behind enemy lines, who risk their lives for us, those who are not willing to do so, and for what? So everyone can turn their backs on them...
The most noble task of the journalist is to "put a human face on war and bring Americans closer to the people involved in these conflicts." In this "War Against Terror," we Americans have sacrificed painfully little in the name of victory. As such, the fighting seems all the more distant, and the dead remain "the others" to a population that had trouble finding Iraq on the map 4 years ago.
Two days after the worst gun massacre in United States history, more than 200 Iraqis living in Baghdad were killed in 4 blasts that amount to the deadliest day in Iraq since the Surge began. And yet jokers like Arizona Senator John McCain see no problem with poo-pooing the continued sufffering of Iraqis living in Baghdad by suggesting that "we can go strolling" in the city (click here), as he, a U.S. Senator, sits in the rear of a military escort through the heavily fortified Green Zone. We need responsible journalists to go to Iraq, learn the facts, and speak truth to the face of political deception. Guys like Kevin Sites and CNN's Michael Ware, often stationed outside of the Green Zone and not privy to the corrupting political whim of Washington, function as the only real check on the lies that GOP partisans put forth in the name of salvaging the disaster that was and is the War in Iraq.
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