American journalist James Foley is missing in Syria after being kidnapped six weeks ago, his family announced today. According to witnesses, the 39-year-old freelancer was taken by unidentified gunmen on Thanksgiving Day in Idlib, the same turbulent northwest Syrian province where NBC foreign chief foreign affairs…
The overwhelming majority of messages I got in response to Peter Bouckaert's call for an email campaign were critical of Gawker's decision not to honor the Richard Engel media blackout. But not all of them. Somalia Report publisher Robert Young Pelton, a longtime freelance reporter, wrote me to alert me to Bouckaert's…
When we published reports on Monday that Richard Engel and his crew had gone missing in Syria, it was over the objections of Engel's employer NBC News, which had been trying to enforce a media blackout on Engel's situation. That was an unpopular decision in some quarters, and it sparked a discussion on the Vulture Club
Following reports yesterday that NBC News' chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel had disappeared along with his production crew shortly after entering Syria through Turkey, it was confirmed today that they had indeed been held hostage by unidentified captors until being freed following a firefight that took place…
NBC News chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel has gone missing in Syria, according to Turkish news reports. The reports also say that Aziz Akyavaş, a Turkish journalist working with Engel, is unaccounted for. NBC News has been successfully keeping Engel's status subject to a news blackout—one to which Gawker…
Tonight, in a segment more fitting for 30 Rock than The Daily Show, Jon Stewart considered the problem that NBC News has because of the fact that it's owned by GE, whose products often appear in controversial news reports.
