UPDATE: 05-19-2005, 12:57 EDT --
Sinclair Broadcast Group commentator Mark Hyman on Wednesday featured Foley's remarks. Hyman's broadcast was picked up and turned into a news story at TownHall.ORG, the aggregation website started by the conservative Heritage Foundation.
Here is a link the the underlying source: the audio MP3 file of what Foley said, in context.
original story below filed 05-13-2005 at 5:15 p.m.
By Bill Densmore
The Media Girafffe Project
The president of the largest union representing American journalists is criticizing the U.S. military for not paying enough attention to the killing of journalists.
“The brutality and the cavalier nature of the attitude of the U.S. military to the killing of journalists is just a scandal,” Linda K. Foley said during a panel at the National Conference for Media Reform in St. Louis. She said the U.S. military targets the studios of non-American media, and destroys them “with impunity.”
Foley also told the panel audience that research studies are finding that years of shrinking newsrooms at the nation’s newspapers has taken a toll. “There is much less passion among the reporters who are left,” she said, and less willingness to do reporting that may place reporters at odds with management . . . “[t]hey want to make a difference. They don’t like working under these circumstances. It’s terrible. It is very, very frustrating.”
Journalists are being targeted in a political and professional sense, added Foley. They are targeted “from the right of the political spectrum, blamed for many ills they just report on.” She said that targeting is unfair.
“What is happening in the media is not the fault of individual journalists,” she added. “What’s wrong is there is a systematic corporate dissolution of what we know as credible reporting and journalism and that is what is wrong and what we have to fight.”
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