Not only journalists die

Calgary Herald (Postmedia) reporter Michelle Lang in Afghanistan.

I’ve never worked in a war zone, the way some from Canada have. I’ve never pursued the crime beat so seriously as to encounter violence face-to-face. I’ve never been physically assaulted while carrying out my work as a journalist. The closest I’ve come to confrontation occurred back in the 1980s, when an oil company representative trying to keep the physical and media lid on a drilling-rig blowout in the Alberta oil patch, told me to remove myself from their property.

“Leave,” the company spokesman said, “or I’ll have you arrested!” (more…)

Youth versus Bullets

Tank Man, 19-year-old Wang Weilin faces Chines tanks on Tiananmen Square in June 1989. Wikipedia.

It’s an image that endures. It’s not old enough for us to call it historical yet. It only goes back about 30 years. But the frames of video taken by an amateur videographer show a man in a white shirt, dark pants, facing a column of military tanks. It was June 4, 1989. It was the final day of the student-organized, non-violence demonstration at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, just before China’s People’s Liberation Army gunned down hundreds of civilians for protesting government corruption and lack of free speech.

“Tank Man,” they called him. But the Sunday Express newspaper in Britain later claimed the man was Wang Weilin, a 19-year-old student, who’d joined the weeks-long protest, despite the threat of annihilation. (more…)