printable versionExperts to discuss journalistic coverage of the war in Iraq
Veteran war journalists and Hoover Senior Fellow Larry Diamond will discuss "Covering the War in Iraq" at 8 p.m. Monday, May 1, at the 40th annual Carlos Kelly McClatchy Memorial Symposium. The event, which is free and open to the public, will take place in Kresge Auditorium.
Panelists will include Dexter Filkins, Baghdad correspondent for the New York Times; Anne Garrels, foreign correspondent for National Public Radio (NPR); and George Packer, staff writer at the New Yorker. Diamond, founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy, served as a senior adviser on governance to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad during the first three months of 2004.
All four participants have extensive experience working in Iraq. In October 2003, Filkins was appointed Baghdad correspondent after having served as Istanbul bureau chief. In 2005, he received the George Polk Award for his reports on the eight-day attack on Iraqi insurgents in Fallujah. The Polk Award jurors said his accounts of street-to-street fighting "conveyed the hellish intensity of urban warfare." Garrels is a roving foreign correspondent for NPR. Her experiences as a journalist in Baghdad during the initial invasion of Iraq are chronicled in her book Naked in Baghdad. Packer has been a staff writer for the New Yorker since May 2003. His book, The Assassin's Gate: America in Iraq, analyzes the events that led to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and reports on subsequent developments in the country.
Diamond is a Stanford professor, by courtesy, of political science and sociology, and coordinates the democracy program at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. His book, Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq, provides an insider's look of what went wrong in Iraq after the initial invasion.