Two foreign journalists have been killed in Homs, activists say, as shelling of a district of the Syrian city continued amid warnings of an escalating humanitarian crisis.
Omar Shakir, an activist in the city, told Al Jazeera that the deaths of Marie Colvin, a US reporter working for the UK’s Sunday Times newspaper, and French photographer Remi Ochlik occurred as a building used by activists as a media centre was shelled on Wednesday.
P U L S E 
very sad…but i’m getting tired of reading, in the nytimes and in supposedly alternative or even left media, reports that are all accompanied by “activists said”…
is there any report from the government and its supporters or are only those labeled from “activists” – and without saying which organization or outside force these “activists” represent – permissible? in the nytimes, on fox tv and apparently on much if not all of the left?
how would we respond to a report that ” activists said” socialists had taken power in the USA, if said activists were from the tea party? double standards are what we should be working against, not exemplifying.
fs
Yes, the Syrian people are just like the tea party. For some reason they are under the illusion that they live in a dictatorship. And you are also right about the media. What kind of media talks to activists? They should be speaking to the government and its supporters. They should also apply this principle to other places, such as Israel. The same kind of conspiracy brought down Mubarak. If only they had given more coverage to his supporters…
The Western media talk to ‘activists’ mainly when those ‘activists’ serve the Empire’s interests or, at least, don’t clearly threaten those interests. The same principle applies to their reporting on Israel, but more so. One rarely is allowed to hear a voice in the U.S., Canadian or European media that opposes the domination of a settler-colonial state over the land and people of Palestine.
Mubarak was disposable and has been replaced by a more direct military regime still tied to the U.S..
BTW, don’t you just love how all those Gulf oil monarchies are leading the fight against “dictatorship” throughout the region? I guess no dictatorships are allowed unless they go along with the dictates of the U.S. and its junior partners.
Is Al Jazeera ‘Western media’?
Al Jazeera frequently interviews Palestinian activists; is it because they are serving ‘the Empire’s interests’?
Al Jazeera is owned and controlled by the Emir of Qatar, a close ally of Western imperialism and a leading attack dog against Libya last year and against Syria now. If they show any sympathy for Palestinians, it’s because they would lose any credibility as an Arab voice if they didn’t.
You are a true genius. When Al Jazeera journalists were endangering their lives to cover the Israeli assault on Gaza in 2009 or Mavi Marmara a year later, I should have known that they were merely trying to soften me up for the imperialism they would unleash a year later. Real cunning people these americans – look how they have duped Arabs from Bahrain to Morocco into doubting the virtues of their authoritarian states.
There were big changes in Al Jazeera last year. See
http://www.middleeastmonitor.org.uk/articles/middle-east/2858
for one analysis of those changes.