Archive for the ‘DRC’ Category
Okay, activists, here's your new problem: Congo is in the media, but not fixed. Now what?
I don’t have data on this–maybe my new heartthrob Ryan C Briggs can help–but I’ve just come across a trope I’m tired of. I acknowledge that I have a tendency to start denying the truth of tropes when I tired of hearing them. Usually that’s when I pick up the phone and do some good [...]
Postpone that volcano hike, maybe?
On top of all the displacement, rebel attacks, and other insecurities, eastern Congo is apparently due for a volcano eruption. The good news? There’s not a whole lot of lava in the risky volcanoes these days. The bad news? An eruption could also ignite the massive pocket of deadly methane gas below Lake Kivu. That’s [...]
Pulitzers Take II: Congo wins (sort of)
So I took my Pulitzer-day swipe at newspaper publishers yesterday, and today I am in slightly better humor and want to congratulate Lynn Nottage on her Pulitzer for “Ruined,” a play about sexual violence in Congo. We in the West may not stop these things, but at least we have the good sense to give [...]
Editorial Choices II, or, Good job, Parade, for not making rape victims all victim-y
Er, sort of. Parade Magazine is circulated in local American newspapers and claims something like 40 gajillion readers. It’s seriously huge, and pretty mainstreamy, but they do a lot of “check out this thing in the world and think about it” stuff. Here’s what’s interesting about this week’s issue: The main story is the World’s [...]
Points to the hubris patrol
A reader has pointed out an error I may have made last week, in a post about writing about rape in Congo. Having struggled with the balancing act that is reporting in impoverished conflict and post-conflict areas, I made a real idiot’s error, assuming that any woman with an byline for an American news agency [...]
"Excuse me, but could you please push apart your thighs?"
I’m not a fan of making lives easy on my readers. I think the kind of bs we usually encounter in what fills our media lives–our televisions, mostly, or our YouTube channels–makes life too easy on us as it is. The stories we see are usually short and shallow; the people we meet in them [...]
I am a freelance journalist and multimedia producer who covers human rights, Africa and foreign affairs. [