On the Media, Kapuściński version
Time goes fast when you’re having fun, so it looks like posts here will be few and far between. But, sometimes one has to share a quote.
The departure of many foreign journalists from Iran after the election, coupled with the intensification of the media spotlight, proved to be an odd experience. I picked up a copy of Ryszard Kapuściński’s The Soccer War while I was in Copenhagen. The old book seller offered me a glass of wine and said, “People either love Kapuściński or hate him.” I love him, if only for the reason that there are few like him around today. And, The Soccer War is his best, since it is not really one book but about ten short books. Plus, it has extremely dry humor. To wit, here is Kapuściński describing a group of foreign journalists who had come to Honduras to report on the four day Soccer War between Honduras and El Salvador:
The major advised us to return to Tegucigalpa, because advancing might mean getting killed without even knowing who had done it. (As if that mattered, I thought.) But the television cameramen said they had to push forward, to the front line, to film soldiers in action, firing, dying. Gregor Straub of NBC said he had to have a close-up of a soldier’s face dripping sweat. Rodolfo Carillo of CBS said he had to catch a despondent commander sitting under a bush and weeping because he had lost a whole unit. A French cameraman wanted a panorama shot with a Salvadorean unit charging a Honduran unit from one side, or vice versa. Somebody else wanted to capture the image of a soldier carrying his dead comrade. The radio reporters sided with the cameramen. One wanted to record the cried of a casualty summoning help, growing weaker and weaker, until he breathed his last breath. Charles Meadows of Radio Canada wanted the voice of a soldier cursing war under a hellish racket of gunfire. Naotake Mochida of Radio Japan wanted the bark of an officer shouting to his commander over the roar of artillery - using a Japanese field telephone.
