James Foley Another Casualty of War to an Unappreciative Journalism Industry
Blood lens.
Journalist James Foley’s death highlights a bigger problem for freelancers out there desperate to put themselves in harms way to make a living for what they love!
Read the Guardian piece by Martin Chulov, it illustrates the lack of care and of training by news organisations as they quite happily take the stories of those on the frontline and pay them peanuts in return.
Who is the real cannon fodder in these conflicts? Many of us just sit back and gobble up information easily provided to us and never realise what someone went through for us to get it!
However this lack of regard for journalists on the frontline is nothing new. I remember reading a piece about Hunter S Thompson covering the Vietnam war conflict. He had to wrangle with the Rolling Stone editor to get life insurance. In the end he covered the conflict with none and with a wife and baby at home, the only difference was that he came back.
Enough is enough this industry must fucking well change! Respect to all freelancers out there who put their life on the line in the most dangerous situations to report the facts, no matter how under appreciated they are!
