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'In a world where the first casualty of war is truth, journalism has become the new battleground.
'Peter Greste spent two decades reporting from the front line in the world’s most dangerous countries before making headlines himself following his own incarceration in an Egyptian prison. Charged with threatening national security, and enduring a sham trial, solitary confinement and detention for 400 days, Greste himself became a victim of the new global war on journalism.
'Wars have always been about propaganda but today’s battles are increasingly between ideas, and the media has become part of the battlefield. Extremists have staked a place in news dissemination with online postings, and journalists have moved from being witnesses to the struggle to a means by which the war is waged – which makes them a target. Having covered conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia, as well as having spent time in prison in Egypt, Greste is extremely well placed to describe in vivid detail what effect this has on the nature of reporting and the mind of the reporter.
'Based on extensive interviews and research, Greste shows how this war on journalism has spread to the West, not just in the murders at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo or the repressions of Putin’s Russia, but Australia’s metadata laws and Trump’s phony war on ‘fake news’.
'In this courageous, compelling, vital account Greste unpicks the extent to which modern investigative journalism is under threat, and the fraught quest – and desperate need – for truth in the age of terrorism.' (Publication summary)
Notes
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Author's note: Between 9/11 2001 and July 2017, 1528 journalists were killed in the line of duty. This book is dedicated to all media workers who have given - or will give - their lives in pursuit of the truth.
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Epigraph: 'the truth is always an abyss. One must - as in a swimming pool - dive from the quivering springboard of trivial, everyday experience, and sink into the depths in order to later rise again - laughing and fighting for breath to the now doubly illuminated surface of things.' - Franz Kafka, The Trial
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
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Robben Island of the Mind : Dispatches from a Cairo Prison
2017
single work
essay
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , December no. 397 2017; (p. 23-24)'It’s a provocative title. Forty-two years ago, Phillip Knightley’s The First Casualty: From the Crimea to Vietnam: The war correspondent as hero, propagandist, and myth-maker (1975) kick-started a new field of media history. Knightley’s rollicking account of journalistic connivance with political and military power from the Crimean to the Gulf Wars spared his industry nothing. The fourth estate’s serial pursuit of national self-interest, its abandonment of objectivity, truth, and morality, revealed many of our most storied war reporters as grovelling servants of the powers that be, monsters of avarice and deception whose first duty was to their own wealth and preferment. If truth was the first casualty of war, principle was prominent among the collateral damage.' (Introduction)
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Robben Island of the Mind : Dispatches from a Cairo Prison
2017
single work
essay
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , December no. 397 2017; (p. 23-24)'It’s a provocative title. Forty-two years ago, Phillip Knightley’s The First Casualty: From the Crimea to Vietnam: The war correspondent as hero, propagandist, and myth-maker (1975) kick-started a new field of media history. Knightley’s rollicking account of journalistic connivance with political and military power from the Crimean to the Gulf Wars spared his industry nothing. The fourth estate’s serial pursuit of national self-interest, its abandonment of objectivity, truth, and morality, revealed many of our most storied war reporters as grovelling servants of the powers that be, monsters of avarice and deception whose first duty was to their own wealth and preferment. If truth was the first casualty of war, principle was prominent among the collateral damage.' (Introduction)
Awards
- 2018 shortlisted Walkley Award — Best Non-Fiction Book
- 2018 longlisted CHASS Australia Prizes — Australia Book Prize