Getting detained in Cairo

Andrew Lee Butters of Time magazine writes about how he got punched and threatened at a makeshift checkpoint on the way into Cairo's Tahrir Square, where the bulk of the protesters are encamped. He's one of dozens of reporters being detained or roughed up by thugs, some of whom are believed to be taking orders from the government.

An excerpt from Butters' post:

More young men arrived, and they punched and frog-marched me to a wall where there were several others being held by the crowd, including a pair of Russian journalists, a Lebanese video crew, a kid who had been caught with anti-Mubarak signs, men with Islamic-style beards, and a poor Nigerian house cleaner who had left home without a passport and whom one raving brute in the crowd accused of being a drug dealer. “Mubarak good, the Egyptian system good!” he shouted at us, though it was hard to see from his decaying teeth, tattered clothes, and yellowed toenails that the Egyptian system had done him much good.

Video shows brutal attack on Russian journalist

Life News, an online Russian news service, has posted a video that shows two men savagely beating journalist Oleg Kashin. The New York Times posted a link to the video in a story about the still unsolved crime.

Nix leaving the Breeze

Daily Breeze reporter Denise Nix is leaving the paper to work for the child-advocacy group First 5 LA. Nix covered the courts for the South Bay newspaper and won this year's distinguished journalist award from the local chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to the Breeze, Nix worked for the Los Angeles Daily Journal and the Associated Press.

Here's part of the goodbye memo from city editor Frank Suraci:

Denise's award this year from SPJ capped off a stellar career here at the Breeze. Not only has she done a yeoman's job tracking all our court cases and handling the day-to-day grind, but Denise has covered some major cases for us over the years as well as helped initiate our popular Crime+Courts blog with Larry [Altman].

We'll miss her hard work and dedication but wish her all the best in her new venture.

Commandos free NYT journalist

Military commandos freed a New York Times reporter held captive for four days by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Stephen Farrell and his interpreter, Sultan Munadi, were captured on Saturday while reporting on a NATO airstrike near Kunduz that killed upwards of 90 people. Munadi was killed during the rescue.

As happened when reporter David Rohde was captured, the New York Times kept quiet about the journalists; abduction.

From the NYT:

“We feared that media attention would raise the temperature and increase the risk to the captives,” said Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times. “We’re overjoyed that Steve is free, but deeply saddened that his freedom came at such a cost. We are doing all we can to learn the details of what happened. Our hearts go out to Sultan’s family.”

Google comes calling

The new Google Voice offers a host of useful tools for journalists, Poynter says. Here's the Google page with an overview. The service is only available by invitation, but the wait is supposed to be relatively short.

If journalism loses its value, do journalists lose theirs as well?

James Rainey at the LA Times makes note of an interesting response to the news that two U.S. journalists had been sentenced to 12 years of hard labor for allegedly crossing the border into North Korea.

Rainey writes:

... a small but determined backlash took form, from a minority who say that reporters who go where they are not supposed to go get what they deserve. That's unsettling, but not surprising given a more insidious sentiment loose in the land: that journalists haven't earned and don't deserve any special privileges.

It's a populist nostrum that seeps into my e-mail basket and oozes from blogs and mainstream media websites with some regularity.

Although my blog is too small to be representative of a national trend, it stuck me that the only comment I received after Current TV reporter Euna Lee and Laura Ling were jailed came from someone who felt they deserved to be punished:

I believe the reporters broke the law and should pay the price. I have family members in the military and think this type of recklessness puts our military in harm’s way just so the reports (sic) can make some money.

Al Scal Guam USA

Clearly someone who's never seen a reporter's paycheck

As Rainy says, "The case of Ling and Lee provides the most recent reminder that some people passionately defend our freedoms, except when it becomes clear they won't come free." I'll let you work out the double meaning, but let's hope that the people who do sympathize with the two journalists take the time to consider why they went to China.

To that end, the Washington Post has a story today about the trafficking of women from North Korea to China that seems to be similar to what Lee and Ling were reporting on.