Kevin Sites, Release date:2007/10/01
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Revelations That Won't Be Televised April 16, 2009By doomsdayer520
#154 REVIEWER
The short attention span and corporate management of mainstream media has pushed serious investigative journalists to the fringes, with good ones like Kevin Sites forced to work independently or in unsustainable online operations. The subject of this book is Sites' year-long project for Yahoo! News in which he visited 20 war zones in a single year. The project led to some unexpected results. With so much traveling Sites did not have the time to report from each combat zone with a great amount of in-depth investigation, but on the other hand the project is a sobering illustration of how much senseless violence is taking place in the world at any given time. The rapid schedule also led Sites to dispense with standard action news coverage and to concentrate on the innocent civilians and overworked soldiers who have to take the brunt of bad decisions by politicians and demagogues. In the process, Sites comes up with incredible insights on war and politics that are as compelling as they are low-key, and his skills as an investigative journalist are complemented by a writer's gift for reaching powerful insights in few words.
America is full of pundits who think they can make big statements about wars and humanitarian crises that they have not seen in person and about which they've only heard propaganda. Kevin Sites and other courageous old-school journalists like him have really been on the front lines. Too bad the mass media is too yellow to give them the airtime that they, and their subjects, deserve. [~doomsdayer520~]
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