When I first came to Silicon Valley, I joked to people in back in the UK that I wanted to be the Kate Adie of the upcoming dotcom collapse. It was a nice funny shorthand to explain less what I was doing, and more what I thought would happen to the Valley in the next few years. Adie is famously the reporter who the BBC used to send into the midst of any major disaster, all flack-jacket and pearls, from the Iranian embassy siege to Lockerbie to Tiananmen square. She’s more than an icon of war reporting in the UK. She’s the fifth horsemen of the apocalypse. When Kate turns up, you know you’re in trouble.
So when she starts talking about a senior officer in the Pentagon telling he that all TV uplinks from journalists will be fired upon, and that the American forces are asking the press who go with them whether “they have feelings against the war” before they let them tag along, and that she is “enormously pessimistic of the chance of a decent on-the-spot reporting, as the war occurs.”, I sat up and listened.
Adie says “You will get it later.” I hope so. I hope someone watches it.
(from robin @ ambiguous)