CNN Presents: "72 Hours Under Fire": Journalists talk about personal risks in covering a war zone (Homs, Syria)

Saturday night (March 17), “CNN Presents” aired “72 Hours Under Fire” about the government siege of Homs, Syria.  CNN journalists and security planners discuss, in the video below, the planning for coverage of the fighting, and the use of safe houses and clandestine movements.

One of the female journalists says, “yes”, we’re going into a war zone.”  In the broadcast, the same journalist commented on her right to leave after covering the story, which the people there do not have.

It seems that “real journalists” have to “pay their dues.”

Wikipedia attribution link for “Krak de Chevaliers” castle near Homs. 

Cartoon Network airs half-hour special "Stop Bullying, Speak Up"

Sunday, at 5:30 PM EDT, the Cartoon Network ("CN") ran a half-hour special “Stop Bullying, Speak Up”,  directed by Lee Hoffman, with basic link here. The program had been announced on CNN.

The show comprised sound-bites from kids and celebrities.  One of the most engaging was Matt, teen doing bicycle tricks on the Chicago lake shorefront.

Celebrities included Trevor Bayne (race cars), Hope Solo (women’s soccer), and Joey Lagono.

The show opened with a brief statement by President Obama, that bullying is wrong, even though it seems to come from community ideas of mandatory social structure and hierarchy.

The show did not focus particularly on the LGBT bullying problems.

The entire show is available on YouTube here.

Zakaria: "Saving Health Care" on GPS

I encourage everyone to watch Fareed Zakaria’s Global Public Square special, “Saving Health Care”, at 8 PM EDT Sunday night (again at 11 PM). 

Zakaria looks at the National Health System in Britain, and the systems in Taiwan and Switzerland. Taiwan has only one insurance company, and Switzerland has a Romneycare (or Obamacare) mandate that actually works pretty well.


Zakaria also told the story of a young male social worker in Camden NJ who investigated patterns of health care use and opened a health maintenance clinic in a large public housing building. 

Zakaria says that the reason the free market has trouble working in health care is that people don’t know when they’ll need it.  Well people tend not to want to pay for insurance, because the sick people generate most of the claims.  The price for dental implants or Lasix surgery or hair replacement will come down, because it is optional.   Coronary Bypass Surgery or Cancer surgery is not a choice, and you have no real option to choose a cheaper provider.  That’s why conservative (or ideological) arguments don’t work, in Zakaria’s opinion. 

The link for the show is here.

CNN brings out more details in Ravi webcam case; more on eldercare crisis

CNN has covered a number of controversial situations in the past 24 hours.

On Friday night, AC360 gave detailed coverage of the conviction of Dharun Ravi for invasion of privacy and the “bias and intimidation” in the Webcam broadcast of Tyler Clementi, which was followed by Clementi’s suicide.

On Saturday, Avery Friedman and Richard Herman, both defense or civil rights attorneys, commented on the case on CNN. They both felt that the New Jersey “bias and intimidation” law could be challenged on appeal, or at least its application. Had Tyler not done what he did, there would have been no prosecution. 

CNN showed a videotape of Ravi’s interview detectives, where he says he put up the webcam originally to watch his stuff in the dorm room.  He was uncomfortable with Tyler’s asking for privacy with another person and asking him to leave.  In my own experience with dorm life, back in the 60s, that wasn’t done. 

But the jury members told Anderson Cooper that Ravi invited others to watch the webcams at least twice, which they think enhances the claim of bias.  Ravi says he did not post the webcam contents on the Internet; they were never available on YouTube, for example. 

Also, one of the CNN accounts this weekend said that the university did offer Tyler a room change and that Tyler refused.  I had not heard this before. I don’t know if it’s correct.

Ravi could face a ten-year sentence and deportation.  But it sounds as though an Appeals Court may see this differently.

In my own circumstances at William and Mary in the fall of 1961, I felt that my roommate did display animus with his comments, but this was qualitatively different from mere pranks or even voyeurism.  In my own mind, I’m a little unconvinced that this incident rises to that level.  (WM ought to have offered me a room change, and I would have taken it.) For example, if anyone from the defense thought my perspective could be helpful for comparison purposes, I would provide it. (By the way, I lived in New Jersey 1970-71 and then in 1972-73.)

The New York Times has a number of detailed articles, the latest March 18 here. What are the expectations in a dorm that one student and ask the other one to leave for intimate encounters? (This would apply to heterosexuals, too).  What about the same problem in a small apartment. There are a lot of details (such as Tyler's reading Ravi's tweets) that make this a very complicated and bizarre, and yes tragic, case.  We can only speculate on what was really on Tyler's mind, and that may be even more difficult to deal with. But "homohatred" is usually more obvious than it was here.

The Tyler Clementi tragedy does deserve a detailed (90 minutes or so) treatment in documentary film, maybe on HBO or maybe in theaters. I reviewed today on my Movies Blog a film from Poland about this general issue (of humiliation by airing videos of intimate encounters).  Could this happen in a heterosexual setting, too?

Later, on Saturday, Frederica Whitfield and Karen Lee went over the problem of eldercare.  There was a story of a woman who suddenly needed 24-hour custodial care after a stroke.  Lee said bluntly that adult children need to prepare to take care of their parents, and even suggested that siblings get together and see who will play “family slave”.  Nursing home and live-in costs are rather comparable now, close to $80000 a year in most parts of the country.  The hourly rate for home-health aides is about $19, and there are serious policy questions looming in the near future over overtime for non-live-ins (and as to whether they are really “contractors”). 


Lee suggested that adult children urge their parents to buy long-term-care insurance.  "If it doesn't come from their pockets, it will come from yours." She explained the spend-down requirements for Medicaid. 

ABC's "Missing": A mom will do anything to get her young back (but this isn't what the CIA is really like)

Well, here we have something with at least some gospel parallelism to my novel. You have a CIA agent whose career is or was covert. And the agent has to go all over the world to solve a mystery.

But here the comparison stops. In the Pilot of ABC’s new series “Missing”, Ashley Judd, as Becca, pulls every escape and hand-to-hand combat trick appropriate for a female James Bond. This is the stuff of the 60s, of world domination.

There is family, of course, at the center. The Pilot opens with Becca on the phone with her husband Paul (Sean Bean) in Vienna. When her 8-year-old son goes back inside to pick up a soccer ball, Paul’s car blows up.

Then its ten years later, and Becca has trained her 18 year old son Michael (Nick Eversman) to be fit. To make the show work, he has to go abroad for college.  So it’s off to Rome.

It isn’t long (about 15 minutes into the hour) that her son has stopped returning cell phone texts, and Becca is worried enough to go to Rome and snoop.  And pretty soon there’s an assassin on every corner.  And CIA Central seems to know about it.  Becca goes into non-stop martial arts.

Becca hacks into a security camera system to find the tape of her son’s abduction, and the evidence trail leads her to Paris.  As the episode ends, she’s floating in the Seine. 

I know, a mother will do anything to save her young.  (Becca says to one CIA agent, “I can tell, you don’t have any kids.”)  Mamma leopard will do anything for her cub (remember the NatGeo show recently?) 

But seriously, what’s interesting to me is not just the non-stop action (even without Sean Connery, Roger Moore or Daniel Craig), but the Mystery.  What is this conspiracy about?  (Remember how “The Event” started?)   For all we know, maybe Michael is “one of them”.  (Remember, in “The Event”, hero Shawn is an “alien” and doesn’t even know it.)

Some day I’ll look into what screenwriting TV episodes is all about. It sounds hard.

ABC’s main link for the show is here.



Update: March 20

Ashley Judd does an interview on her own bout of depression and her role in this series, on ABC Nightline, here. 

Anderson Cooper gives his thoughts on "STD site creator" interview; AC360 covers California's history with eugenics

Anderson gave his thoughts (link) after the interview Monday (on his own afternoon show) of Cyrus Sullivan, founder of “STDcarriers”.  I covered the substance of the interview and compared to other sources on my main blog.

Anderson Cooper will question and scold guests on his shows (including AC360) more than other talk show hosts.  I’m surprised that Mr. Sullivan even agreed to be on the show if he could not defend what he is doing with the site. 

I certainly get the point – he is facilitating the possibility that others will make false accusations that cannot be easily refuted – but at a much lower level almost any service provider may be doing this.  I explained the Section 230 implications on the main posting. Today, I replied by Twitter to Anderson, and send links and comments to both Huffington Post and Electronic Frontier Foundation.  This whole matter needs a lot more investigation.

Anderson had also covered the “Kony 2012” film and director Jason Russell.

AC360 on CNN has the second part of the story of California’s sad history with eugenics back in the 1930s, with Elizabeth Cohen reporting here.  The state even had corresponded with the Nazis on the issue.  North Carolina is trying to provide reparations, but California is stalling.  The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh has shown an exhibit on the issue.

ABC 20-20: "Revenge for Real", in the Hamptons

Cynthia McFadden hosted the first “ABC Revenge for Real” Wednesday March 7 from ABC 20-20, hosted here.  It was not as engaging as the fictitious drama.  The story of a rich woman with rapidly fatal breast cancer (wealth could not save her life),  an unfaithful husband, and an electrical contractor Daniel Pelosi, who was convicted of a an invasion-style beating of the husband in the fall of 2001, shortly after 9/11.  

Much of the show, toward the end, consisted of  a long prison interview with Pelosi, who told ABC to send divers into a Long Island Sound channel to look for a recorder that was never found.  Remote surveillance of the estate from cameras does figure into the story.

I recall a minor real-life "Revenge" story in Fire Island in 1978, not leading to anyone's death, though. 

  

There was no one to like in this episode.  I can't wait for the series to resume.  Nolan is just too fascinating.