The Journalist And The Murderer Quotes

Every journalist who is not too stupid or full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.

Women in the online gaming community have been harassed, threatened, and driven out. Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist media critic who documented such incidents, received support for her work, but also, in the words of a journalist, 'another wave of really aggressive, you know, violent personal threats, her accounts attempted to be hacked. And one man in Ontario took the step of making an online video game where you could punch Anita's image on the screen. And if you punched it multiple times, bruises and cuts would appear on her image.' The difference between these online gamers and the Taliban men who, last October, tried to murder fourteen-year-old Malala Yousafzai for speaking out about the right of Pakistani women to education is one of degree. Both are trying to silence and punish women for claiming voice, power, and the right to participate. Welcome to Manistan.

The concept of the psychopath is, in fact, an admission of failure to solve the mystery of evil—it is merely a restatement of the mystery—and only offers an escape valve for the frustration felt by psychiatrists, social workers, and police officers, who daily encounter its force.

Terrorism” is a word that has become a plague on our vocabulary, the excuse and reason and moral permit for state-sponsored violence— our violence—which is now used on the innocent of the Middle East ever more outrageously and promiscuously. Terrorism, terrorism, terrorism. It has become a full stop, a punctuation mark, a phrase, a speech, a sermon, the be-all and end-all of everything that we must hate in order to ignore injustice and occupation and murder on a mass scale. Terror, terror, terror, terror. It is a sonata, a symphony, an orchestra tuned to every television and radio station and news agency report, the soap-opera of the Devil, served up on prime-time or distilled in wearyingly dull and mendacious form by the right-wing “commentators” of the American east coast or the Jerusalem Post or the intellectuals of Europe. Strike against Terror. Victory over Terror. War on Terror. Everlasting War on Terror. Rarely in history have soldiers and journalists and presidents and kings aligned themselves in such thoughtless, unquestioning ranks.

What gives journalism its authenticity and vitality is the tension between the subject's blind self absorption and the journalist's skepticism. Journalists who swallow the subject's account whole and publish it are not journalists but publicists.

The writer ultimately tires of the subject's self-serving story, and substitutes a story of his own.

I wish that future novelists would reject the pressure to write for the betterment of society. Art is not media. A novel is not an 'afternoon special' or fodder for the Twittersphere or material for the journalists to make neat generalizations about culture. A novel is not Buzzfeed or NPR or Instagram or even Hollywood. Let's get clear about that. A novel is a literary work of art meant to expand consciousness. We need novels that live in an amoral universe, past the political agenda described on social media. We have imaginations for a reason. Novels like American Psycho and Lolita did not poison culture. Murderous corporations and exploitative industries did. We need characters in novels to be free to range into the dark and wrong. How else will we understand ourselves?

because I got distracted Googling for information on the nanny murder (a good journalist always checks her facts, particularly when the primary source is Sophie, a girl who spouts gossip like she’s auditioning to become the next Perez Hilton). It turns out however that Sophie was correct on all points about the murder, which isn’t that comforting.

But now the cartels murdered a Mexican journalist every few weeks, and Lydia recoiled from her husband’s integrity. It felt sanctimonious, selfish. She wanted Sebastián alive more than she wanted his strong principles.

He never asked me what I thought, and I never told him what I thought, because in my view that's the way a journalist ought to behave. You ought not to be going around to people volunteering your feelings. That's daily journalism.

Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and "the public's right to know"; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living.

A correspondence is a kind of love affair.

Something seems to happen to people when they meet a journalist, and what happens is exactly the opposite of what one would expect. One would think that extreme wariness and caution would be the order of the day, but in fact childish trust and impetuosity are far more common. The journalistic encounter seems to have the same regressive effect on a subject as the psychoanalytic encounter. The subject becomes a kind of child of the writer, regarding him as a permissive, all-accepting, all-forgiving mother, and expecting that the book will be written by her. Of course, the book is written by the strict, all-noticing, unforgiving father.

We were all journalists, professional truth-seekers, but one thing we knew about the truth that laymen were prone to disregard was that it need not be literal or factual; the unpredictable human personality was itself a fact.

If a queen comes to America, crowds fill the station squares, and attendant British journalists rejoice, 'You see: the American Cousins are as respectful to Royalty as we are.' But the Americans have read of queens since babyhood. they want to see one queen, once, and if another came to town next week, with twice as handsome a crown, she would not draw more than two small boys and an Anglophile. Americans want to see one movie star, one giraffe, one jet plance, one murder, but only one. They run up a skyscraper or the fame of generals and evangelists and playwrights in one week and tear them all down in an hour, and the mark of excellence everywhere is 'under new management'.

Western intellectual enthusiasm for Communism tended to peak not in times of ‘goulash Communism’ or ‘Socialism with a human face’, but rather at the moments of the regime’s worst cruelties: 1935–39 and 1944–56. Writers, professors, artists, teachers and journalists frequently admired Stalin not in spite of his faults, but because of them. It was when he was murdering people on an industrial scale, when the show trials were displaying Soviet Communism at its most theatrically macabre, that men and women beyond Stalin’s grasp were most seduced by the man and his cult.

I'm not involved, not involved," I repeated. It has been an article of my creed. The human condition being what it was, let them fight, let them love, let them murder, I would not be involved. My fellow journalists called themselves correspondents; I preferred the title of reporter. I wrote what I saw. I took no action – even an opinion is a kind of action.

Although the journalists anticipated violence, several had predicted shouted abuse. But when the crowd caught sight of the murderers, with their escort of blue-coated highway patrolmen, it fell silent, as though amazed to find them humanly shaped.

As you no doubt gathered, I do not devote the care to word selection and organization in my letters that I do in my books Generally, I don't write letters at all...Writing, for me, is work, and I do not like to do my work carelessly, but if I waited until I got a letter into the shape I'd be happy with, you would never hear another word from me and would think I had perished on a mountain...

No one has expressed what is needed better than Abdel Rahman al-Rashed, the general manager of the London-based al-Arabiya news channel. One of the best-known and most respected Arab journalists working today, he wrote the following, in Al-Sharq Al-Awsat (September 6, 2004), after a series of violent incidents involving Muslim extremist groups from Chechnya to Saudi Arabia to Iraq: "Self-cure starts with self-realization and confession. We should then run after our terrorist sons, in the full knowledge that they are the sour grapes of a deformed culture... The mosque used to be a haven, and the voice of religion used to be that of peace and reconciliation. Religious sermons were warm behests for a moral order and an ethical life. Then came the neo-Muslims. An innocent and benevolent religion, whose verses prohibit the felling of trees in the absence of urgent necessity, that calls murder the most heinous of crimes, that says explicitly that if you kill one person you have killed humanity as a whole, has been turned into a global message of hate and a universal war cry... We cannot clear our names unless we own up to the shameful fact that terrorism has become an Islamic enterprise; an almost exclusive monopoly, implemented by Muslim men and women. We cannot redeem our extremist youth, who commit all these heinous crimes, without confronting the Sheikhs who thought it ennobling to reinvent themselves as revolutionary ideologues, sending other people's sons and daughters to certain death, while sending their own children to European and American schools and colleges.

...self-important western journalists who'd given up their sacred trust to become cheerleaders for trendy causes, the way communist journalists had once been cheerleaders for the government...They were depriving the free world of its most valuable weapon in condemning and exposing the worst human scourge since Nazism: the targeting and murder of civilians to achieve political and religious ends.

My unlucky star had destined me to be born when there was much talk about morality and, at the same time, more murders than in any other period. There is, undoubtedly, some connection between these phenomena. I sometime ask myself whether the connection was a priori, since these babblers are cannibals from the start - or a connection a posteriori, since they inflate themselves with their moralizing to a height which becomes dangerous for others. However that may be, I was always happy to meet a person who owed his touch of common sense and good manners to his parents and who didn't need big principles. I do not claim more for myself, and I am a man who for an entire lifetime has been moralized at to the right and the left - by teachers and superiors, by policemen and journalists, by Jews and Gentiles, by inhabitants of the Alps, of islands, and the plains, by cut-throats and aristocrats - all of whom looked as if butter wouldn't melt in their mouths.

The therapy of psychoanalysis attempts to restore to the neurotic patient the freedom to be uninteresting that he lost somewhere along the way. It proposes to undermine the novelistic structures on which he has constructed his existence, and to destroy the web of elaborate, artful patterns in which he is caught.

The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and 'the public's right to know'; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living.

He was, as the novelist and muckraking journalist Upton Sinclair wrote, “willing by deliberate and shameful lies, made out of whole cloth, to stir nations to enmity and drive them to murderous war.

So you got Black Lives Matter up your ass, every citizen a journalist with a cell-phone camera at the ready, and you go to work each day with the whole world thinking you’re a murdering racist. Okay,

People tell journalists their stories as characters and dreams deliver their elliptical messages: without warning, without context, without concern for how odd they will sound when the dreamer awakens and repeats them.

..I began speaking.. First, I took issue with the media's characterization of the post-Katrina New Orleans as resembling the third world as its poor citizens clamored for a way out. I suggested that my experience in New Orleans working with the city's poorest people in the years before the storm had reflected the reality of third-world conditions in New Orleans, and that Katrina had not turned New Orleans into a third-world city but had only revealed it to the world as such. I explained that my work, running Reprieve, a charity that brought lawyers and volunteers to the Deep South from abroad to work on death penalty issues, had made it clear to me that much of the world had perceived this third-world reality, even if it was unnoticed by our own citizens. To try answer Ryan's question, I attempted to use my own experience to explain that for many people in New Orleans, and in poor communities across the country, the government was merely an antagonist, a terrible landlord, a jailer, and a prosecutor. As a lawyer assigned to indigent people under sentence of death and paid with tax dollars, I explained the difficulty of working with clients who stand to be executed and who are provided my services by the state, not because they deserve them, but because the Constitution requires that certain appeals to be filed before these people can be killed. The state is providing my clients with my assistance, maybe the first real assistance they have ever received from the state, so that the state can kill them. I explained my view that the country had grown complacent before Hurricane Katrina, believing that the civil rights struggle had been fought and won, as though having a national holiday for Martin Luther King, or an annual march by politicians over the bridge in Selma, Alabama, or a prosecution - forty years too late - of Edgar Ray Killen for the murder of civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi, were any more than gestures. Even though President Bush celebrates his birthday, wouldn't Dr. King cry if he could see how little things have changed since his death? If politicians or journalists went to Selma any other day of the year, they would see that it is a crumbling city suffering from all of the woes of the era before civil rights were won as well as new woes that have come about since. And does anyone really think that the Mississippi criminal justice system could possibly be a vessel of social change when it incarcerates a greater percentage of its population than almost any place in the world, other than Louisiana and Texas, and then compels these prisoners, most of whom are black, to work prison farms that their ancestors worked as chattel of other men? ... I hoped, out loud, that the post-Katrina experience could be a similar moment [to the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fiasco], in which the American people could act like the children in the story and declare that the emperor has no clothes, and hasn't for a long time. That, in light of Katrina, we could be visionary and bold about what people deserve. We could say straight out that there are people in this country who are racist, that minorities are still not getting a fair shake, and that Republican policies heartlessly disregard the needs of individual citizens and betray the common good. As I stood there, exhausted, in front of the thinning audience of New Yorkers, it seemed possible that New Orleans's destruction and the suffering of its citizens hadn't been in vain.

It had occurred to her that the ultimate expression of Tom Wolfe’s ‘saturation reporting’ was possibly at hand: the copycat murder of the journalist, with the murderer finishing the piece and filing it, complete with photographs and videos.

Journalists are taught they are never the story. As it happened, the longer I was a journalist, the better it suited me to disappear behind the professional voice of an omniscient third person, belonging everywhere and nowhere, asking questions and answering none. Every conclusion I published was double-sourced, fact-checked, and hyperlinked. My name might have been below the headlines, but the stories I wrote belonged to other people in other places, families whose grief and pain were so massive that mine was irrelevant.

EVERY journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like

Society mediates between the extremes of, on the one hand, intolerably strict morality and, on the other, dangerously anarchic permissiveness through an unspoken agreement whereby we are given leave to bend the rules of the strictest morality, provided we do so quietly and discreetly. Hypocrisy is the grease that keeps society functioning in an agreeable way, by allowing for human fallibility and reconciling the seemingly irreconcilable human needs for order and pleasure. When Buckley and Wambaugh said bluntly that it’s all right to deceive subjects, they breached the contract whereby you never come right out and admit you have stretched the rules for your own benefit. You do it and shut up about it, and hope you don’t get caught, because if you are caught no one — or no one who has any sense — will come forward and say he has done the same thing himself.

What you have to understand about the Guccis,” Jenny told a journalist in 1994, “is that they are all completely mad, incredibly manipulative, and not very clever. They have to be in control, but as soon as they get what they want, they crush it! They are destroyers, it’s as simple as that!

Ah, but let’s consider Communion for a moment,” he replied. “What’s odd is that these early followers of Jesus didn’t get together to celebrate his teachings or how wonderful he was. They came together regularly to have a celebration meal for one reason: to remember that Jesus had been publicly slaughtered in a grotesque and humiliating way. “Think about this in modern terms. If a group of people loved John F. Kennedy, they might meet regularly to remember his confrontation with Russia, his promotion of civil rights, and his charismatic personality. But they’re not going to celebrate the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald murdered him!

Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction learns—when the article or book appears—his hard lesson. Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and "the public's right to know"; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living.

From 1976 to 1983, Washington supported a devastating military dictatorship in Argentina that ran all branches of government, outlawed elections, and encouraged school and business leaders to provide information on subversive people. The administration took control of the police, banned political and union organizations, and tried to eliminate all oppositional elements in the country through harassment, torture, and murder. Journalists, students, and union members faced a particularly large amount of bloody repression, thus ridding the nation of a whole generation of social movement leaders. As was the case in other Latin American countries, the threat of communism and armed guerrilla movements was used as an excuse for Argentina's dictatorial crackdowns. Hundreds of torture camps and prisons were created. Many of the dead were put into mass graves or thrown out of places into the ocean. Five hundred babies of the murdered were given to torturers' families and the assets of the dead totaling in the tens of millions of dollars, were all divided up among the perpetrators of the nightmare. Thirty thousand people were killed in Argentina's repression.

The subject of a piece of writing has not suffered the tension and anxiety endured by the subject of the "Eichmann experiment" (as it has been called) - on the contrary, he has been on a sort of narcissist's holiday during the period of interviews - but when the moment of peripeteia comes, he is confronted with the same mortifying spectacle of himself flunking a test of character he did not know he was taking.

Unlike other relationships that have a purpose beyond themselves and are clearly delineated as such (dentist-patient, lawyer-client, teacher-student), the writer-subject relationship seems to depend for its life on a kind of fuzziness and murkiness, if not utter covertness, of purpose. If everybody put his cards on the table, the game would be over. The journalist must do his work in a kind of deliberately induced state of moral anarchy.

Here again Trump accepted the words of a foreign autocrat, just as he had believed Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman did not order the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi and as he had believed Russian president Vladimir Putin did not interfere in the 2016 U.S. election. Trump said that Kim “felt very badly,” but claimed to only know about Warmbier’s case after the fact. “He tells me that he didn’t know about it,” Trump said, “and I take him at his word.

Of real sensational journalism, as it exists in France, in Ireland, and in America, we have no trace in this country. When a journalist in Ireland wishes to create a thrill, he creates a thrill worth talking about. He denounces a leading Irish member for corruption, or he charges the whole police system with a wicked and definite conspiracy. When a French journalist desires a frisson there is a frisson; he discovers, let us say, that the President of the Republic has murdered three wives. Our yellow journalists invent quite as unscrupulously as this; their moral condition is, as regards careful veracity, about the same. But it is their mental calibre which happens to be such that they can only invent calm and even reassuring things. The fictitious version of the massacre of the envoys of Pekin was mendacious, but it was not interesting, except to those who had private reasons for terror or sorrow. It was not connected with any bold and suggestive view of the Chinese situation. It revealed only a vague idea that nothing could be impressive except a great deal of blood. Real sensationalism, of which I happen to be very fond, may be either moral or immoral. But even when it is most immoral, it requires moral courage. For it is one of the most dangerous things on earth genuinely to surprise anybody. If you make any sentient creature jump, you render it by no means improbable that it will jump on you. But the leaders of this movement have no moral courage or immoral courage; their whole method consists in saying, with large and elaborate emphasis, the things which everybody else says casually, and without remembering what they have said. When they brace themselves up to attack anything, they never reach the point of attacking anything which is large and real, and would resound with the shock. They do not attack the army as men do in France, or the judges as men do in Ireland, or the democracy itself as men did in England a hundred years ago. They attack something like the War Office--something, that is, which everybody attacks and nobody bothers to defend, something which is an old joke in fourth-rate comic papers

There was a risk that Morrison might slip away, and before releasing him, Agent Burger made sure that he’d gone through a rigorous process known as Bertillonage. Devised by the French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon in 1879, it was the first scientific method for identifying repeat criminals. Using a caliper and other special tools, Agent Burger, with the help of the Dallas police, took eleven of Morrison’s body measurements. Among them were the length of his left foot, the width and length of his head, and the diameter of his right ear. After Agent Burger informed Morrison of the purpose of these measurements, he also commissioned a mug shot, another of Bertillon’s innovations. In 1894, Ida Tarbell, the muckraking journalist, wrote that any prisoner who passed through Bertillon’s system would be forever “spotted”: “He may efface his tattooing, compress his chest, dye his hair, extract his teeth, scar his body, dissimulate his height. It is useless.” But Bertillonage was already being displaced by a more efficient method of identification that was revolutionizing the world of scientific detection: fingerprinting. In some cases, a suspect could now be placed at the scene of a crime even without a witness present. When Hoover became the bureau’s acting director, he created the Identification Division, a central repository for the fingerprints of arrested criminals from around the country. Such scientific methods, Hoover proclaimed, would assist “the guardians of civilization in the face of the common danger.

A few weeks later, in the middle of a cold December night, the pair, along with 247 other radicals, were herded onto a freighter and shipped off to Soviet Russia, a government the United States didn’t even recognize. Greeted as heroes upon their arrival, Goldman and Berkman believed they had landed in a country where their politics would find a home. But once again, a promised land disappointed. Instead, they found workers in conditions of servitude, corruption among their managers, and no tolerance of free speech. In a remarkable moment, Goldman and Berkman complained to the leader of the revolution himself, Vladimir Lenin. Unlike muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens and other American fellow travelers, Berkman and Goldman courageously criticized the Russian Revolution. Lenin dismissed the complaints and said that there was no room for free speech in the revolutionary period.

Separated from everyone, in the fifteenth dungeon, was a small man with fiery brown eyes and wet towels wrapped around his head. For several days his legs had been black, and his gums were bleeding. Fifty-nine years old and exhausted beyond measure, he paced silently up and down, always the same five steps, back and forth. One, two, three, four, five, and turn . . . an interminable shuffle between the wall and door of his cell. He had no work, no books, nothing to write on. And so he walked. One, two, three, four, five, and turn . . . His dungeon was next door to La Fortaleza, the governor’s mansion in Old San Juan, less than two hundred feet away. The governor had been his friend and had even voted for him for the Puerto Rican legislature in 1932. This didn’t help much now. The governor had ordered his arrest. One, two, three, four, five, and turn . . . Life had turned him into a pendulum; it had all been mathematically worked out. This shuttle back and forth in his cell comprised his entire universe. He had no other choice. His transformation into a living corpse suited his captors perfectly. One, two, three, four, five, and turn . . . Fourteen hours of walking: to master this art of endless movement, he’d learned to keep his head down, hands behind his back, stepping neither too fast nor too slow, every stride the same length. He’d also learned to chew tobacco and smear the nicotined saliva on his face and neck to keep the mosquitoes away. One, two, three, four, five, and turn . . . The heat was so stifling, he needed to take off his clothes, but he couldn’t. He wrapped even more towels around his head and looked up as the guard’s shadow hit the wall. He felt like an animal in a pit, watched by the hunter who had just ensnared him. One, two, three, four, five, and turn . . . Far away, he could hear the ocean breaking on the rocks of San Juan’s harbor and the screams of demented inmates as they cried and howled in the quarantine gallery. A tropical rain splashed the iron roof nearly every day. The dungeons dripped with a stifling humidity that saturated everything, and mosquitoes invaded during every rainfall. Green mold crept along the cracks of his cell, and scarab beetles marched single file, along the mold lines, and into his bathroom bucket. The murderer started screaming. The lunatic in dungeon seven had flung his own feces over the ceiling rail. It landed in dungeon five and frightened the Puerto Rico Upland gecko. The murderer, of course, was threatening to kill the lunatic. One, two, three, four, five, and turn . . . The man started walking again. It was his only world. The grass had grown thick over the grave of his youth. He was no longer a human being, no longer a man. Prison had entered him, and he had become the prison. He fought this feeling every day. One, two, three, four, five, and turn . . . He was a lawyer, journalist, chemical engineer, and president of the Nationalist Party. He was the first Puerto Rican to graduate from Harvard College and Harvard Law School and spoke six languages. He had served as a first lieutenant in World War I and led a company of two hundred men. He had served as president of the Cosmopolitan Club at Harvard and helped Éamon de Valera draft the constitution of the Free State of Ireland.5 One, two, three, four, five, and turn . . . He would spend twenty-five years in prison—many of them in this dungeon, in the belly of La Princesa. He walked back and forth for decades, with wet towels wrapped around his head. The guards all laughed, declared him insane, and called him El Rey de las Toallas. The King of the Towels. His name was Pedro Albizu Campos.

Those reporters, writers, photographers, and editors are the best Americans I know. They cherish the ideals of their imperfect profession and of the Republic whose freedoms, equally imperfect in practice have so often made those ideals real. They want desperately to do good, honorable work. In spite of long hours and low pay, they are insistently professional. They are also brave. I can't ever forget that in Indochina 65 journalists were killed in the course of recording the truth about that war. . . .Reporters and photographers did not stop dying when Vietnam was over. They have been killed in Lebanon and Nicaragua, in Bosnia and Peru, and in a lot of other places where hard rain falls. I can't believe that these good men and women died for nothing. I know they didn't. They died because they were the people chosen by the tribe to carry the torch to the back of the cave and tell the others what is there in the darkness. They died because they were serious about the craft they practiced. They died because they believed in the fundamental social need for what they did with a pen, a notebook, a typewriter, or a camera. They didn't die to increase profits for the stockholders. They didn't die to obtain an invitation to some White House dinner for a social-climbing publisher. They died for us. As readers or journalists, we honor them when we remember that their dying was not part of a plan to make the world cheaper, baser, or dumber. They died to bring us the truth.

The DUCE diverted funds intended for the Fiume adventure, and used them for His own election campaign. He was arrested for the illegal possession of arms, sent parcel bombs to the Archbishop of Milan and its mayor, and after election was, as is well-known, responsible for the assassination of Di Vagno and Matteoti. Since then He has been responsible for the murders of Don Mizzoni Amendola, the Rosselli brothers, and the journalist Piero Gobetti, quite apart from the hundreds who have been the victims of His squadistri in Ferrara, Ravenna and Trieste, and the thousands who have perished in foreign places whose conquest was useless and pointless. We Italians remain eternally grateful for this, and consider that so much violence has made us a superior race, just as the introduction of revolvers into Parliament and the complete destruction of constitutional democracy have raised our institutions to the greatest possible heights of civilisation. Since the illegal seizure of power, Italy has known an average of five acts of political violence per diem, the DUCE has decreed that 1922 is the new Annus Domini, and He was pretended to be a Catholic in order to dupe the Holy Father into supporting Him against the Communists, even though He really is one Himself. He has completely suborned the press by wrecking the premises of dissident newspapers and journals. In 1923 he invaded Corfu for no apparent reason, and was forced to withdraw by the League of Nations. In 1924 He gerrymandered the elections, and He has oppressed minorities in the Tyrol and the North-East. He sent our soldiers to take part in the rape of Somalia and Libya, drenching their hands in the blood of innocents, He has doubled the number of the bureaucracy in order to tame the bourgeoisie, He has abolished local government, interfered with the judiciary, and purportedly has divinely stopped the flow of lava on Mt Etna by a mere act of will. He has struck Napoleonic attitudes whilst permitting Himself to be used to advertise Perugina chocolates, He has shaved his head because He is ashamed to be seen to be going bald, He has been obliged to hire a tutor to teach Him table manners, He has introduced the Roman salute as a more hygienic alternative to the handshake, He pretends not to need spectacles, He has a repertoire of only two facial expression, He stands on a concealed podium whilst making speeches because He is so short, He pretends to have studied economics with Pareto, and He has assumed infallibility and encouraged the people to carry His image in marches, as though He were a saint. He is a saint, of course. He has (and who are we to disagree?) declared Himself greater than Aristotle, Kant, Aquinas, Dante, Michelangelo, Washington, Lincoln, and Bonaparte, and He has appointed ministers to serve Him who are all sycophants, renegades, racketeers, placemen, and shorter than He is. He is afraid of the Evil Eye and has abolished the second person singular as a form of address. He has caused Toscanini to be beaten up for refusing to play 'Giovinezza', and He has appointed academicians to prove that all great inventions were originally Italian and that Shakespeare was the pseudonym of an Italian poet. He has built a road through the site of the forum, demolishing fifteen ancient churches, and has ordered a statue of Hercules, eighty metres high, which will have His own visage, and which so far consists of a part of the face and one gigantic foot, and which cannot be completed because it has already used up one hundred tons of metal.

We said that if you don't quench those flames at once, they will spread all over the world; you thought we were maniacs. At present we have the mania of trying to tell you about the killing, by hot steam, mass-electrocution and live burial of the total Jewish population of Europe. So far three million have died. It is the greatest mass-killing in recorded history; and it goes on daily, hourly, as regularly as the ticking of your watch. I have photographs before me on the desk while I am writing this, and that accounts for my emotion and bitterness. People died to smuggle them out of Poland; they thought it was worth while. The facts have been published in pamphlets, White Books, newspapers, magazines and what not. But the other day I met one of the best-known American journalists over here. He told me that in the course of some recent public opinion survey nine out of ten average American citizens, when asked whether they believed that the Nazis commit atrocities, answered that it was all propaganda lies, and that they didn't believe a word of it. As to this country, I have been lecturing now for three years to the troops and their attitude is the same. They don't believe in concentration camps, they don't believe in the starved children of Greece, in the shot hostages of France, in the mass-graves of Poland; they have never heard of Lidice, Treblinka or Belzec; you can convince them for an hour, then they shake themselves, their mental self-defence begins to work and in a week the shrug of incredulity has returned like a reflex temporarily weakened by a shock. Clearly all this is becoming a mania with me and my like. Clearly we must suffer from some morbid obsession, whereas the others are healthy and normal. But the characteristic symptom of maniacs is that they lose contact with reality and live in a phantasy world. So, perhaps, it is the other way round: perhaps it is we, the screamers, who react in a sound and healthy way to the reality which surrounds us, whereas you are the neurotics who totter about in a screened phantasy world because you lack the faculty to face the facts. Were it not so, this war would have been avoided, and those murdered within sight of your day-dreaming eyes would still be alive.

INTERNATIONAL LAW WAS CREATED DURING THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION BECAUSE a group of Mexicans—and one African American—gang-raped and murdered two teenaged girls in Houston, Texas.1 The crime made history in another way: It led to the most death sentences handed out for a single crime in Texas since 1949.2 Do you even know about this case? The only reason the media eventually admitted that the lead rapist, Jose Ernesto Medellin, was an illegal alien from Mexico was to try to overturn his conviction on the grounds that he had not been informed of his right, as a Mexican citizen, to confer with the Mexican consulate. Journalists have an irritating tendency to skimp on detail when reporting crimes by immigrants, a practice that will not be followed here. One summer night in June 1993, fourteen-year-old Jennifer Ertman and Elizabeth Peña, who had just turned sixteen, were returning from a pool party, and decided to take a shortcut through a park to make their 11:30 p.m. curfew. They encountered a group of Hispanic men, who were in the process of discussing “gang etiquette,” such as not complaining if other members talked about having sex with your mother.3 The girls ran away, but Medellin grabbed Jennifer and began ripping her clothes off. Hearing her screams, Elizabeth came back to help her friend. For more than an hour, the five Hispanics and one black man raped the teens, vaginally, anally, and orally—“every way you can assault a human being,” as the prosecutor put it.4 The girls were beaten, kicked, and stomped, their teeth knocked out and their ribs broken. One of the Hispanic men told Medellin’s fourteen-year-old brother to “get some,” so he raped one of the girls, too. But when it was time to kill the girls, Medellin said his brother was “too small to watch” and dragged the girls into the woods.5 There, the girls were forced to kneel on the ground and a belt or shoelace was looped around their necks. Then a man on each side pulled on the cord as hard as he could. The men strangling Jennifer pulled so hard they broke the belt. Medellin later complained that “the bitch wouldn’t die.” When it was done, he repeatedly stomped on the girls’ necks, to make sure they were dead.6 At trial, Medellin’s sister-in-law testified that shortly after the gruesome murders, Medellin was laughing about it, saying they’d “had some fun with some girls” and boasting that he had “virgin blood” on his underpants.7 It’s difficult to understand a culture where such an orgy of cruelty is bragged about at all, but especially in front of women.

Remember when we were idealistic young journalists who thought we could make the world a better place? We wanted to chase out corrupt politicians and uncover fraud and investigate murders. It turns out we were just filling space around the ads, and nobody really cared that much about what we wrote.

Alison Laurie would later suggest to a New Zealand Listener journalist that there were extenuating circumstances. “They were absolutely isolated as young lesbians. They undoubtedly felt that if they were separated they would never meet anyone else again—so they were desperate.” “These days,” she continued, “we would hope that two young lesbians in that position could ring up Lesbian Line and get advice and support.

The lad was an inquisitive little shaver. I could see him making a good journalist one day.

[On kneeling down at the Warsaw Ghetto Monument during his 1970 state visit to Poland:] "Es war eine ungewöhnliche Last, die ich auf meinem Weg nach Warschau mitnahm. Nirgends hatte das Volk, hatten die Menschen so gelitten wie in Polen. Die maschinelle Vernichtung der polnischen Judenheit stellte eine Steigerung der Mordlust dar, die niemand für möglich gehalten hatte. [...] Ich hatte nichts geplant, aber Schloß Wilanow, wo ich untergebracht war, in dem Gefühl verlassen, die Besonderheit des Gedenkens am Ghetto-Monument zum Ausdruck bringen zu müssen. Am Abgrund der deutschen Geschichte und unter der Last der Millionen Ermordeten tat ich, was Menschen tun, wenn die Sprache versagt. Ich weiß es auch nach zwanzig Jahren nicht besser als jener Berichterstatter, der festhielt: 'Dann kniet er, der das nicht nötig hat, für alle, die es nötig haben, aber nicht knien – weil sie es nicht wagen oder nicht können oder nicht wagen können.'" ("I took an extraordinary burden to Warsaw. Nowhere else had a people suffered as much as in Poland. The robotic mass annihilation of the Polish Jews had brought human blood lust to a climax which nobody had considered possible. [...] Although I had made no plans, I left my accommodations at Wilanow Castle feeling that I was called upon to mark in some way the special moment of commemoration at the Ghetto Monument. At the abyss of German history and burdened by millions of murdered humans, I acted in the way of those whom language fails. Even twenty years later, I wouldn't know better than the journalist who recorded the moment by saying, 'Then he, who would not need to do this, kneels down in lieu of all those who should, but who do not kneel down – because they do not dare, cannot kneel, or cannot dare to kneel.'") [Note: The quotation used by Brandt is from the article Ein Stück Heimkehr [A Partial Homecoming] (Hermann Schreiber/ Der Spiegel No. 51/1970, Dec. 14, 1970]

A short man who himself had been an attorney before becoming a broadcast journalist shouted, “Jonathan? Is it true that evidence found in the house exculpates Theodore Martin in the murder of his wife?” Jonathan smiled benignly. “I’ve seen the evidence that Mr. Cole found, and I’ll be in consultation with the district attorney’s office sometime in the next few days. Now, if you’ll excuse me.” More questions exploded at us from a dozen directions, and they were all about Mr. Cole.

In Kendall’s mind, there were only three types of women: good, bad, and fallen. Being a journalist muddied my position in his moral hierarchy, but Kendall tried to ignore that inconvenience and slot me into the first group. It was cold comfort. I’d read that in a man like this, afflicted with the conditions Dr. Stone had mentioned, admiration was intertwined with hatred. So labeling a person “good” meant he would almost automatically see her as withholding approval. Any resulting feelings of stress or shame then morphed immediately into overwhelming rage. That

She let the silence lengthen, allowing Janice to make up her own mind about what she would and wouldn't say. It was an old journalistic trick. some people found silence so uncomfortable that they would rush to fill it - saying more than they had bargained for

When, in June 2015, relatives of the murder victims in Charleston, South Carolina, came face-to-face with the killer, several of them told him at once that they forgave him. Something similar happened after the Amish school shooting in October 2006. These incidents, widely reported, strike secular journalists and their readers as strange to the point of being almost incredible. Do these people really mean it? It is clear that they do. The forgiveness was unforced. It wasn’t said through clenched teeth, in outward conformity to a moral standard, while the heart remained bitter. Forgiveness was already a way of life in these communities. They were merely exemplifying and extending, in horrific circumstances, the character they had already learned and practiced.

Lesley gritted her teeth and plunged her phone into her pocket. The journalist was bluffing. But she couldn’t afford to let Sadie Dawes find out how DCI Mackie had died. Not before she did

Dart initially echoed Darwin’s theory that bipedalism freed the hands of early hominins to make and use hunting tools, which in turn selected for big brains, hence better hunting abilities. Then, in a famous 1953 paper, clearly influenced by his war experiences, Dart proposed that the first humans were not just hunters but also murderous predators.18 Dart’s words are so astonishing, you have to read them: The loathsome cruelty of mankind to man forms one of his inescapable characteristics and differentiative features; and it is explicable only in terms of his carnivorous, and cannibalistic origin. The blood-bespattered, slaughter-gutted archives of human history from the earliest Egyptian and Sumerian records to the most recent atrocities of the Second World War accord with early universal cannibalism, with animal and human sacrificial practices of their substitutes in formalized religions and with the world-wide scalping, head-hunting, body-mutilating and necrophilic practices of mankind in proclaiming this common bloodlust differentiator, this predaceous habit, this mark of Cain that separates man dietetically from his anthropoidal relatives and allies him rather with the deadliest of Carnivora. Dart’s killer-ape hypothesis, as it came to be known, was popularized by the journalist Robert Ardrey in a best-selling book, African Genesis, that found a ready audience in a generation disillusioned by two world wars, the Cold War, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, political assassinations, and widespread political unrest.19 The killer-ape hypothesis left an indelible stamp on popular culture including movies like Planet of the Apes, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and A Clockwork Orange. But the Rousseauians weren’t dead yet. Reanalyses of bones in the limestone pits from which fossils like the Taung Baby came showed they were killed by leopards, not early humans.20 Further studies revealed these early hominins were mostly vegetarians. And as a reaction to decades of bellicosity, many scientists in the 1970s embraced evidence for humans’ nicer side, especially gathering, food sharing, and women’s roles. The most widely discussed and audacious hypothesis, proposed by Owen Lovejoy, was that the first hominins were selected to become bipeds to be more cooperative and less aggressive.21 According to Lovejoy, early hominin females favored males who were better at walking upright and thus better able to carry food with which to provision them. To entice these tottering males to keep coming back with food, females encouraged exclusive long-term monogamous relationships by concealing their menstrual cycles and having permanently large breasts (female chimps advertise when they ovulate with eye-catching swellings, and their breasts shrink when they are not nursing). Put crudely, females selected for cooperative males by exchanging sex for food. If so, then selection against reactive aggression and frequent fighting is as old as the hominin lineage.22

The story had been in the making for three months. The author was William Bradford Huie, a forty-five-year-old nationally known journalist, author, and television personality from Hartselle, Alabama.

I ordered one more and the bartender made a deal with me. He'd only splash whiskey on my ice if I gave him my car keys. That sounded like a good deal to me and I took it. "Death is my beat" "Technically, I don't work for you. My paper has rules about reporters misrepresenting themselves." Schifino reached into his pocket and pulled out his cash. He handed a dollar across the desk to me. I reached across the murder scene photos to take it. "There," he said. "I just paid you a dollar. You work for me." I thought he was guilty as sin. It was the only way I could live with losing the case. Abasiophilia. Paraphilia. Single-Bullet Theory: "I mean like the love of your life. Everybody's got one person out there. One bullet. And if you're lucky in life, you get to meet that person. And once you do, once you're shot through the heart, then there's nobody else. No matter what happens--death, divorce, infidelity, whatever--nobody else can ever come close. That's the single-bullet theory." Unrelenting pain. He waited for someone to stop it. To save him from it. But no one came. No one heard him. He waited in darkness.

Grandmama’s idea of a joke.

Journalists and editors for the county’s local newspapers wrote approvingly of African Americans’ being lynched, with one going so far as to predict that a black man soon would be tortured and murdered in Independence because “the conditions are favorable at this time. There are a lot of worthless young Negro men in town who do nothing.”9

there are worse things than death or murder.” “Like what?” I asked. “Though it’s hard to comprehend,” he said, “the worst thing is to say to God that you don’t need him. Why? Because a dead person can be restored to life by God; a bereaved person can find peace from God; a person who has been violated can find God’s sustenance and strength and even see God conquer through the dark mystery of evil. In other words, there is recourse through these atrocities and tragedies. But to a person who says he or she doesn’t need God, what is the recourse? There is none.

After Rushdie, the fear of a knife in the ribs or a bomb at the office meant that liberals who stuck by liberalism were in the wrong. They knew the consequences now. If someone killed them, they were guilty of provoking their own murder. In the eyes of most politicians and most of the journalists, broadcasters, academics and intellectuals whose livelihoods depended on the freedom to debate and criticise, the targets of religious violence had no one to blame but themselves.

Not long after the arrests of Ward and Fontenot, their story came to the attention of a respected New York journalist, Robert Mayer, then living in the Southwest.

The haunted type­writer clacked busily away to my left, operated by a journalist who was murdered several years ago, but hadn't let a little thing like being dead interfere with his work.

might wonder why I didn’t scream or why I was so calm in the face of a dead body. Two years ago, I would have freaked out enough to win an Oscar for my performance, but any outward burst from me now would be from finding yet another body. This was the second one this year.

If I had to do it again, I would not have committed this violence by inaction and by silence. I would have stepped between, and I would have said to the man perpetrating the direct violence, “If you want to hit someone, at least hit someone who will hit you back.” There is violence by lying. A few pages ago I mentioned that journalist Julius Streicher was hanged at Nuremberg for his role in fomenting the Nazi Holocaust. Here is what one of the prosecutors said about him: “It may be that this defendant is less directly involved in the physical commission of crimes against Jews. The submission of the prosecution is that his crime is no less the worse for that reason. No government in the world . . . could have embarked upon and put into effect a policy of mass extermination without having a people who would back them and support them. It was to the task of educating people, producing murderers, educating and poisoning them with hate, that Streicher set himself. In the early days he was preaching persecution. As persecution took place he preached extermination and annihilation. . . . [T]hese crimes . . . could never have happened had it not been for him and for those like him. Without him, the Kaltenbrunners, the Himmlers . . . would have had nobody to carry out their orders.”390 The same is true of course today for the role of the corporate press in atrocities committed by governments and corporations, insofar as there is a meaningful difference.

Over the next 1,364 days, the Khmer Rouge, seeking to obliterate the social classes and create an agrarian society of peasants, was responsible for killing, starving, or working to death about two million Cambodians, out of a population of eight million. Accounting for the percentage of people destroyed, Pol Pot’s Communist regime was the most murderous in the modern age.

But if initial accusations were sparse, this all changed in April, after the first journalists arrived in town.

That winter the fever of mass murder, atheism and reckless spending in Paris seemed to be approaching its climax. At Christmas the obscene and diseased journalist, Hebert, presided over the Feast of Reason in Notre Dame, where a whore was elevated at the high altar amid Rabelaisian rites. In the prisons thousands of innocent men and women, flung there by some Party sadist's whim, fed out of troughs on offal or were driven in droves chained like cattle through the streets. (1) To decent English minds it seemed unthinkable that men could survive who broke every law of God and man, who robbed and murdered and blasphemed, who denied justice, pity and humanity itself in their ruthless search for power. “From the nature of the mind of man and the necessary progress of human affairs,” Pitt declared in Parliament, “it is impossible that such a system can be of long duration.” “Surely,” cried the high-minded Windham, “Heaven will presently put a whip into every honest hand to lash these villains naked through the world.

The network of right-wing foundations, the corporations that fund them, and the journalists who echo their claims have created a tremendous problem for American science. A recent academic study found that of the fifty-six “environmentally skeptical” books published in the 1990s, 92 percent were linked to these right-wing foundations (only thirteen were published in the 1980s, and 100 percent were linked to the foundations).83 Scientists have faced an ongoing misrepresentation of scientific evidence and historical facts that brands them as public enemies—even mass murderers—on the basis of phony facts.

The Ten Commandments As Interpreted by Robin Palmetier 1. Don’t lie. Unless it’s to the police. 2. Don’t cheat your customers. Robin always made sure her dime bags were just a bit larger than any other dealers’ in the area, insuring loyalty in her clientele. 3. Always be polite. Especially to people who don’t like you, as it will piss them off. 4. Don’t steal from anyone. Anyone meaning people, leaving corporations and the IRS fair game. 5. Don’t kill. This one was also on the Bible’s list but, like many Christians, Robin had a long list of exceptions to this rule. It was okay to kill sexual predators (unless they were born-again while serving time), liberal commentators, and anyone described as a "bad guy" by the greatest journalist and political leader of all time, Box News commentator Malcolm Wright. Unless, of course, Mr. Wright happened to be talking about one of her personal friends, which, on occasion, he had. 6. Do not take the Lord’s name in vein. Shit, fuck, cock, pussy, bitch, bastard and their ilk were just fine. Goddamn’s and Jesus Christ’s were no-no’s. 7. Always repay a favor with a favor. Someone does something nice for you, do something nice right back. Being in someone’s debt is a dangerous thing. 8. Affirm that every word in the Bible is true, except the parts that clearly aren’t. Like that thing about eating shellfish—though supposedly an abomination on par with adultery, murder, poly-cotton blends and paying interest on a mortgage—it could not possibly be God’s will. Robin loved scallops and knew the good Lord would not wish to deny her this pleasure. 9. Discuss all decisions with God directly and listen closely to his advice. Sadly, when Praline tried this himself he got nothing but an extended silence, while his mother always seemed to get very detailed instructions. 10. Always remember your mama loves you.

And when asked about the murders, Jerome “Jerry” Brudos, who also went by the nicknames “The Lust Killer” and “The Shoe Fetish Slayer,” would laugh when he told investigative journalist Lars Larson that “it was a slow Saturday night.” It made Larson’s skin crawl. “Jerome

Another Munich-based journalist, Fritz Gerlich, made the ultimate sacrifice in his pursuit of Hitler. Editor of the newspaper Der gerade Weg (The Straight Path), Gerlich was one of Hitler’s fiercest critics. He was arrested after Hitler came to power and murdered in the Dachau concentration camp outside Munich. “We Will Not Be Intimidated,” the Munich Post said in a front-page headline a few days before storm troopers ransacked and shut down its offices in March 1933. Whatever the Munich Post’s faults, that headline should be the rallying cry of journalists around the globe whose work is threatened by those who place accumulating and wielding authoritarian power above the defense of citizens’ rights.

President Ronald Reagan’s top foreign policy advisers. After the assassination of the FDR leaders, she quipped to journalists that their slaying was a “reminder that people who choose to live by the sword die by the sword.” When asked the views of the incoming administration on the brutal murder of the American churchwomen, she replied, “The nuns were clearly not just nuns. The nuns were also political activists.

It is easy to see what art is at risk of losing in such continual involvement: their former comfort, mainly, an that divine freedom that lives and breathes in Mozart's works. We can now better understand the tormented and tenacious atmosphere of our works of art, their furrowed brow and sudden debacles. And so, we tell ourselves we understand that this is why there are more journalists than writers, ore amateur painters tan Cézannes, and why children's literature and murder mysteries have taken the place of Tolstoy's War and Peace or Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma.

It is easy to see what art is at risk of losing in such continual involvement: their former comfort, mainly, an that divine freedom that lives and breathes in Mozart's works. We can now better understand the tormented and tenacious atmosphere of our works of art, their furrowed brow and sudden debacles. And so, we tell ourselves we understand that this is why there are more journalists than writers, or amateur painters than Cézannes, and why children's literature and murder mysteries have taken the place of Tolstoy's War and Peace or Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma.

It is easy to see what art is at risk of losing in such continual involvement: their former comfort, mainly, and that divine freedom that lives and breathes in Mozart's works. We can now better understand the tormented and tenacious atmosphere of our works of art, their furrowed brow and sudden debacles. And so, we tell ourselves we understand that this is why there are more journalists than writers, or amateur painters than Cézannes, and why children's literature and murder mysteries have taken the place of Tolstoy's War and Peace or Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma.

In 1999, Rebecca Godfrey walked into this story. By that time the involved teens had been so hounded by journalists that they distrusted and were disgusted by them. (There is an almost satiric moment in Under the Bridge when a respected Canadian journalist draws an indignant and absurd parallel between the Columbine killers and a completely innocent girl only tangentially involved with the attack on the fourteen-year-old.)

Oscar Goodman’s three terms were as bombastic and controversial as his arguments in court. His policy proposals included setting up brothels in Las Vegas, legalizing all street drugs to collect enough revenue to pay teachers six-figure salaries, and cutting the thumbs off people convicted of graffiti while broadcasting the punishment on television. Not surprising, none of his libertarian ideas were enacted into city ordinance.(60) Goodman’s administration was unlike any in the country. He was the first Las Vegas mayor to have his face on casino chips. He photographed a model for a topless pictorial for the Playboy website. Bombay Sapphire gin recruited him as its spokesman because he was never far from a gin martini, which he garnished with sliced jalapeno peppers and a glass of ice on the side. Oscar Goodman donated the gin endorsement honorarium to charity. In 2005, however, he faced nationwide controversy when fourth graders at a local elementary school asked him the one thing he would want with him if he was stranded on a desert island. “A bottle of Bombay Sapphire gin,” Mayor Goodman responded, adding that one of his main hobbies was drinking. He later apologized if anyone was offended

Critically, the French investigative team would also be given whatever support they required in Ireland, including full access to the original garda murder file. This ensured that the French investigators would have access to all witness statements, forensic reports, the crime scene photographs and the post-mortem examination file of State Pathologist Professor John Harbison. If the French police team had not had access to the Irish files, an investigation would be fatally compromised from the outset. This granting of access was unprecedented. It also confirmed, beyond any doubt, that no action would ever be taken by the DPP over the garda case file in Ireland. Any such action would be critically undermined from the very start by the fact that access to the file had been given to someone outside the Irish judicial process–and would open any future prosecution, even one taken on the basis of new evidence, to an immediate legal challenge based on a breach of process. While it was never confirmed, the astonishing level of access granted to Magistrate Gachon and his police team was clearly the result of consultations between Paris and Dublin at the very highest levels. Even allowing for existing European judicial and police cooperation protocols, journalists covering the case–including myself–felt the level of access given to the French was astonishing.

met Glenn several times back when I was running the Hermitage Fund, trying to expose corruption at some of the companies we invested in. He was tall, unkempt, and vaguely bearlike. In 2011, he had given up journalism to set up an investigation firm in Washington called Fusion GPS. “I thought Glenn was one of the good guys,” I said. “Perhaps he was, but now he does opposition research for anyone willing to pay,” the journalist said, referring to the types of investigations done by firms that dig up dirt on political candidates

Billy Jensen is an investigative journalist. He focuses on missing persons and unsolved murders, first in his writing and later as an active investigator solving crimes. His skills as a digital executive translated into his investigative work, and he has been integral in solving ten homicides as well as locating missing persons. Mr. Jensen is the author of Chase Darkness with Me: How One True Crime Writer Started Solving Murders.

Billy Jensen is an investigative journalist. He focuses on missing persons and unsolved murders, first in his writing and later as an active investigator solving crimes.

Amor Mašović, the president of the Bosnian government’s Commission for Tracing Missing Persons, confirms that there are hundreds of undiscovered mass graves. To this day, the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) is helping identify dead bodies from such mass graves, using technologies such as DNA testing. As many as 150 prisoners were killed every single night in Omarska Camp. Estimates from the United States also suggest that, at a minimum, several hundreds of civilians were murdered during the camp’s evacuation period. Actual numbers are likely to be much higher. All the toilets in the camp were blocked. There were human feces throughout the area. The prisoners’ extremely deplorable and terrifying conditions were confirmed by a British journalist named Ed Vulliamy in a testimony. He also mentioned that the detainees consumed water from an industrially polluted river causing them severe diarrhea and intestinal diseases. There were zero criminal reports filed against the Serb perpetrators. The victims were constantly subjected to abuse resulting in serious psychological and physical deterioration.

ALTHOUGH writers and publishers like to grumble about the proliferation of libel lawsuits in this country, few would seriously propose that anything be done to reverse the trend. The Ayatollah’s death sentence on Salman Rushdie brings into relief the primitive feeling that lies behind every libel suit, and makes the writer only too grateful for the mechanism the law provides for transforming the displeased subject’s impulse to kill him into the move civilized aim of extracting large sums of money from him. Although the money is rarely collected—most libel suits end in defeat for the plaintiff or in a modest settlement—the lawsuit itself functions as a powerful therapeutic agent, ridding the subject of his feelings of humiliating powerlessness and restoring to him his cheer and amour propre. From the lawyer who takes him into his care he immediately receives the relief that a sympathetic hearing of one’s grievances affords. Conventional psychotherapy would soon veer off into an unpleasurable examination of the holes in one’s story, but the law cure never ceases to be gratifying; in fact, what the lawyer says and writes on his client’s behalf is gratifying beyond the latter’s wildest expectations. The rhetoric of advocacy law is the rhetoric of the late-night vengeful brooding which in life rarely survives the skeptical light of morning but in a lawsuit becomes inscribed, as if in stone, in the bellicose documents that accrue while the lawsuit takes its course, and proclaims with every sentence “I am right! I am right! I am right!” On the other side, meanwhile, the same orgy of self-justification is taking place. The libel defendant, after an initial anxious moment (we all feel guilty of something, and being sued stirs the feeling up), comes to see, through the ministrations of his lawyer-therapist, that he is completely in the right and has nothing to fear. Of pleasurable reading experiences there may be none greater than that afforded by a legal document written on one’s behalf. A lawyer will argue for you as you could never argue for yourself, and, with his lawyer’s rhetoric, give you a feeling of certitude that you could never obtain for yourself from the language of everyday discourse. People who have never sued anyone or been sued have missed a narcissistic pleasure that is not quite like any other.

Western intellectual enthusiasm for Communism tended to peak not in times of ‘goulash Communism’ or ‘Socialism with a human face’, but rather at the moments of the regime’s worst cruelties: 1935–39 and 1944–56. Writers, professors, artists, teachers and journalists frequently admired Stalin not in spite of his faults, but because of them. It was when he was murdering people on an industrial scale,

RECIPE FOR MURDER 1 stocky man who abuses his wife 1 small tender wife 1 medium-sized tough woman in love with the wife 1 double-barrelled shotgun 1 small Karoo town marinated in secrets 3 bottles of Klipdrift brandy 3 little ducks 1 bottle of pomegranate juice 1 handful of chilli peppers 1 mild gardener 1 fire poker 1 red-hot New Yorker 7 Seventh-day Adventists (prepared for The End of the World) 1 hard-boiled investigative journalist 1 soft amateur detective 2 cool policemen 1 lamb 1 handful of red herrings and suspects mixed together Pinch of greed Throw all the ingredients into a big pot and simmer slowly, stirring with a wooden spoon for a few years. Add the ducks, chillies and brandy towards the end and turn up the heat.

Another book, Deal, by journalist Harvey Aronson, came out in 1978. It’s also out of print, priced high online, and missing from area libraries. Aronson, now 93, did not respond to requests to discuss the Campisis.

Most damaging in the recordings in which [President Leonid] Kuchma gave his interior minister an order to kidnap an opposition journalist, Heorhii Gongadze. He had disappeared in September of that year, and his headless body was found in a forest near Kyiv in November... With American and European leader demanding an impartial investigation into the President's role in the kidnapping and murder of Gongadze, Kuchma abandoned his ambitions of European integration and turned for support to Russia and its new president, Vladimir Putin (p.58-59).

Then, some reading on 20th Century history: Curtis Yarvin: Unqualified Reservations — a broad survey of Western historical anomalies, with a focus on the 20th and 19th centuries. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn: The Gulag Archipelago — what the Soviet Union was actually like. Yuri Slezkine: The House of Government — how the Soviet Union actually worked. Janet Malcom: The Journalist and the Murderer — how journalists “befriend and betray” their subjects for clicks, a book taught in journalism schools as something of a how-to manual. Antony C. Sutton: Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution and Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler — how different groups of capitalists funded the communist and fascist revolutions respectively. Ashley Rindsberg: The Gray Lady Winked — how The New York Times systematically misrepresented the truth over the 20th century.

Most damaging in the recordingd in which [Leonid] Kuchma gave his interior minister an order to kidnap an opposition journalist, Heorhii Gongadze. He had disappeared in September of that year, and his headless body was found in a forest near Kyiv in November... With American and European leader demanding an impartial investigation into the President's role in the kidnapping and murder of Gongadze, Kuchma abandoned his ambitions of European intgration and turned for support to Russia and its new president, Vladimir Putin (p.58-59).

My job is to go to places where people die. I pack my bags, talk to the survivors, write my stories, then go home to wait for the next catastrophe. I don’t wait very long. I can tell you about those places. There have been many of them in the last decade. They are the coastal villages after typhoons, where babies were zipped into backpacks after the body bag rans out. They are hillsides in the south, where journalists were buried alive in a layer cake of cars and corpses. They are the cornfields in rebel country and the tent cities outside blackened villages and the backrooms where mothers whispered about the children that desperation had forced them to abort.

Dead is a good word for a journalist in the age of Duterte. Dead doesn’t negotiate, requires little verification. Dead is a sure thing, has bones, skin, and flesh, can be touched and seen and photographed and blurred for broadcast. Dead, whether it’s 44 or 58 or 27,000 or 1, is dead.

Jack had probably always been an author, but had dressed himself in journalist's clothes to keep the peace

I don’t know how you journalists do it, I really don’t. There must be something inside you that isn’t quite right. Because how can you just keep writing, what’s essentially the same story, over and over again and it not break you? Woman is murdered. Woman is missing. Woman is raped. And that’s on top of all the other shit we have to deal with. The unwanted groping. The everyday sexism. The fucking pay gap. The domestic workload. The emotional labour. Everything is on your shoulders when you’re a woman.

There, on July 4, 1984, eight years after the Entebbe rescue, Shultz made the following statement to the gathered diplomats and journalists: Many countries have joined the ranks of what we might call the “League of Terror” as full-fledged sponsors and supporters of indiscriminate, and not so indiscriminate, murder. Terrorists and those who support them have definite goals. Terrorist violence is the means of attaining those goals. Can we as a country, can the community of free nations, stand in a purely defensive posture and absorb the blows dealt by terrorists? I think not. From a practical standpoint, a purely passive defense does not provide enough of a deterrent to terrorism and the states that sponsor it. It is time to think long, hard, and seriously about more active means of defense—defense through appropriate preventive or preemptive actions against terrorist groups before they strike.5

For, of course, at bottom, no subject is naive. Every hoodwinked widow, every deceived lover, every betrayed friend, every subject of writing knows on some level what is in store for him, and remains in the relationship anyway, impelled by something stronger than his reason.

On the Birthday of Murtaza Bhutto My nephew drives on a route that crosses alongside 70 Clifton every day since I am in Karachi. It reminds me that I was then a working journalist. I visited the last 70 Clifton in 1977, the resident of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, later, Benazir Bhutto, and then Murtaza Bhutto and Fatima Bhutto during the driving towards Karachi Press Club; I asked my nephew to stop near 70 Clifton so that we can click a few pics of it. Today is Murtaza Bhutto's Birthday, and he became the victim of armed evil and murder. I stood outside 70 Clifton, remembering inside the conversations, discussions, and delightful atmosphere in the Bhutto era. I felt sadness and pain, imagining that time when pleasure, joy, and mob walked around it, but today it was dead-quiet and displayed sadness on its walls; the Birthday existed; however, the figure held that day was not there, and his daughter far away from Pakistan in exile-life, though the justice has failed, not the God.

He seemed to have some sort of mental block that a black man could even be a journalist. Started asking if I had gear on me – if I sold gear, if I sold gear to Ryder, if that was what I was doing there—