When NPR journalists were killed, the organization investigated their death

When no one looked into the death of two NPR journalists, David Gilkey and Zabihullah Tamanna, the news organization did it on their own.

I vividly remember where I was when I got the news that Gilkey and Tamanna were killed. I still understand why I felt connected to these deaths. Too many journalists are killed each year (often fixers and local journalists in war zones), so it’s often hard to follow-up on all the cases.

“After the loss of our colleagues, we wanted to be sure we understood what really happened on the road that day, so we kept reporting,” said Michael Oreskes, the network’s senior vice president of news and editorial director.

NPR did not buy into the theory that the two reporters, who were travelling in a humvee that was a part of a convoy, along with two other NPR reporters who were in a different vehicle: Pentagon reporter Tom Bowman and producer Monika Evstatieva. To solve they issue, they investigated.

Instead of being the victim of a random attack by Talibans in the Helmand province, NPR instead found that the journalists were targeted.

Back in the United States by this time, they found reporting complicated by language and time differences. But they finally arranged a call with Baryalai Helali, a Defense Ministry spokesman, and this time got a different story: Tamanna wasn’t killed by an RPG. He was shot, outside the vehicle. Helali had no explanation for how Tamanna got out of a Humvee, without any apparent injuries, if it had been attacked by an RPG with enough force to kill the person sitting next to him.

The foursome was in the Helmand province “to assess the effectiveness of the Afghan National Army” which had taken over the security responsibilities from the American troops in southern Afghanistan. Only two journalists returned that day.

The Business of the FPJQ

I was chatting with the editor of a major publication earlier this week about the FPJQ, Quebec’s federation of journalists.

Specifically, I told him how ridiculous I thought the prices to attend the federation’s workshops were to which he said, “I don’t really care about the FPJQ.” This week’s 2-hour workshop about data journalism given by a CBC journalists costs more than 50$ for non-members.

He mentioned an article about the prices specifically would really be “inside baseball” for his publication, but I did feel like this opinion should be out there since it’s shared by many young journalists I’ve spoken to.

What I’ve observed and read this week

(where I write about things I think about)

• Yeah well… this is awkward. NBC giving a voice and showcasing InfoWars, and known conspiracy theorist Alex Jones is certainly not the best way to gain respect.
• “J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. has asked for its local TV ads and digital ads to be removed from Ms. Kelly’s show and from all NBC news programming until after the show airs, according to a person familiar with the matter,” writes the Wall Street Journal’s Suzanne Vranica in the paper.
• When Fox News host Sean Hannity kept pushing the theory that former DNC staffer Seth Rich was killed because he knew too much, advertisers took more time to pull their adds. It took less time for the bank to make the decision. Is this a hint of what’s about to come in TV?
• I personally think this can go both ways. This gives more legitimacy to advertisement. It indicates that advertisers really care about what you produce (J.P Morgan Chase’s chief marketing officer Kristin Lemkau even went to Twitter to criticize NBC’s program). Maybe it can lead to having MORE advertisers on certain shows, or more important ones.
• The Columbia Journalism wrote about the dire financial state of Postmedia, Canada’s leading newspaper brand.
• The piece touched on the morale in the Postmedia newsroom. Mathew Ingram, a senior writer at Fortune, tweeted: “I’ve talked to several folks at Postmedia recently and morale is non-existent.” In November, a month after laying of 20 per cent of its staff, gave $2.3 million in retention bonuses to executives. “Everyone who worked there was embarrassed and angry that day,” former National Post Sean Craig told CJR writer Bryan Borzykowski.
• “Rolling Stone has settled a lawsuit with the University of Virginia fraternity whose members were falsely accused of raping a female student in a Nov. 2014 article,” scooped Daily Caller reporter Chuck Ross. According to the Daily Caller, the magazine will be paying the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity $1.65 million to settle the defamation lawsuit.