- Steven Senne/AP PHOTOS
- The media claimed James Foley as one of their own after his death.
Last Friday my friend Dave Jones, a former Reader colleague, e-mailed me asking me to weigh in on James Foley. David had just read Michael Lev’s tribute to Foley in the Tribune as an uncommonly brave and committed journalist who understood the risks and accepted them as the price to be paid for doing work that must be done.” Lev, a former Tribune foreign correspondent with combat experience in the Middle East, identified with Foley as someone who experienced “that sort of high of being close to combat and being able to come back and tell that story.”
The James Foley execution video has been bothering me, more and more each day.
But James Foley, as we all should know by now, was a freelance. And, in the news business today, that can make a world of difference—a life-or-death difference these days.
With most of the reporting I’m reading, seeing, hearing on poor James Foley, I think that’s the background scenario that most people carry around about such things, if we bother to worry about him at all, as anything other than another fallen “American hero.” So it bothered me to see Lev lumping Foley together with the WWII guys of Great Generation acclaim and with his own comparatively sheltered, corporately covered reporting stint in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Their cuts in “personnel” are adding up to very real costs in life and limb (and, yes, livelihoods) of actual persons. And people should know that.
