VICE's
Correspondents
Confidential
Tells FARC
Jokes, Somalia
Shoot Canceled
By
Matthew
Russell Lee
UNITED
NATIONS,
November 19 --
Two episodes
of VICE's new
series
"Correspondent
Confidential"
were screened
Tuesday night
under the high
ceiling of the
Explorers'
Club in
Manhattan.
The first
concerned a
journalist
going
undercover as
a prostitute
in Turkey.
The second
recounted the
one-day
kidnapping by
the FARC in
Colombia
of then-LA
Times
correspondent
T. Christian
Miller. Watch
online here.
Both
stories were
told with
drawing and
cartoons while
producer
Carrie
Ching's
interviews
with the
journalists
ran as a
single story.
Afterward
Ching said she
wanted it to
seem like
having a beer
with
the journalist
(she said this
of T. Chistian
Miller, or as
all the
other
panelists
called him,
T).
The
panel was
moderated by
Foreign
Policy's Noah
Shachtman, who
said this
form of
creative
non-fiction
was previously
advanced by
Rolling Stone
and Esquire.
(He also told
a Chris Rock
joke about one
spouse telling
the other to
"go get
kidnapped so
we have
something to
talk
about" that
had the
perhaps
desired
unsettling
effect among
some
in the mostly
white,
relatively
young crowd.)
VICE's
Suroosh Avi
said none of
his shoots
have yet
resulted in
casualties,
although one
recently
planned for
Somalia was
called off
when it
began to feel
like a set-up
for a
kidnapping.
Somalia
is
what came to
mind for
Inner City
Press, as well
as Libya. This
week a journalist
was killed in
Tripoli, but
the UN
Security
Council
has said
nothing,
in contrast to
their
near-immediate
Press
Statement
about the
killing of two
French
journalists in
Mali.
Similarly, there
have been no
Council
statements on
the killing of
Somali
journalists.
Is there a
two-tier
system of
protection?
Also
on the panel
was Joel Simon
of CPJ, which
the flier
called
"Citizens
to Protect
Journalists."
And perhaps it
should be that
-- as
Inner City
Press previously
reported,
despite
mentioning
local
journalists
CPJ seems in
the grip of
big media.
At the UN,
when shown
big
media attempts
to get the Press thrown
out for
its reporting
on
Sri Lanka,
CPJ said it
was too busy -
and continued
cavorting with
the censors.
One
analysis is
that VICE,
growing fast,
views CPJ as a
form of
legitimization.
We'd say, VICE
doesn't need
it. It is
doing new work
and doing it
well, like
this series.
It should just
continue
forward,
exploring.
Carrie
Ching
explained that
the VICE piece
about the
journalist
going
undercover as
a prostitute,
show on
YouTube,
raised the
profile of
the story.
She said
transparency
is the new
objectivity,
and declined
to criticize
the journalist
for
"deceptively"
going
undercover. We
say, yes, this
too is
journalism, a
kind that
should
be brought to
the UN. Watch
this site.
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