After 1000 Times Goodnight
 | |||
| Female war photographer, Anja Niedringhaus |
After seeing
1000 Times Goodnight, I was wondering
about women journalists and how many had been wounded or killed. After doing a
little research I found some answers in this article by Wojciech Adamczyk.
You probably won’t want to read this
lengthy article so I’ve condensed it a bit.
“A
relatively new problem is posed by the repeated instances of aggression against
female investigative journalists and war correspondents. Data collected by The
Committee to Protect Journalists shows that the percentage of female media
employees killed while performing their professional duties could amount to
seventeen percent per year.”
Women didn’t
start reporting on wars until the late 19th century. Here is a list
of some of the women in history that became investigative reporters and
reported from the war zones:
Lady
Florence Caroline Dixie – 1881, The Boer War (She was assaulted by two men dressed
as women who threatened her with a knife and tried to strangle her).
Kathleen
“Kit” Blake Coleman – 1898,
Spanish American War, Cuba
Martha
Gellman – 1937, Spanish Civil War
Dickey
Chapelle – in 1965 reporting from Vietnam, killed by a piece of exploding
shrapnel.
Jill Carrol
– 2006 reporting from Iraq, was kidnapped then later released.
Marie
Colvin - 1980s reported from Kosovo, Chechnya where she lost her teeth, from
Sri Lanka, lost an eye. She wrote “do women report wars differently from men?
The question used to make me bristle. It irritated me to think that I would be
judged as a woman war correspondent rather than as a writer, taking the same
risks and covering the same story as my male colleagues.” She was killed in
2012 in Homs, Syria, under a barrage of missiles and mortars.
Mika
Yamamoto – was killed in Aleppo, Syria after being fired on by govt. troops.
Victoria
Guerin – in the 1990s reported on the mafia in Ireland. She was shot by two
attackers on a motorbike and died two days before she was to present a paper at
a conference in London entitled Dying to
Tell a Story: Journalism at Risk.
Anna
Stepanovna Politkovskaya – She accused Vladimir Putin of state terrorism. She
was murdered in 2006, shot to death in the building where she lived. There was
no clear answer as to who carried out the attack
What I
didn’t find in this research was a study of women journalists and their
families which was the theme of the film we saw. Maybe the subject is too close
to home and the women don’t want to talk about it.
Upcoming Films to Local Theaters
(my opinion only, not the opinion of the North County Film Club)
October:
Steve Job
November:
Trumbo - about screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (Bryan Cranston) and the Hollywood blacklisting
Spotlight - Investigation into abuse in the Catholic Church
Janis - about singer, Janis Joplin
