Patrick Cockburn
| Patrick Cockburn link Amazon IMDB Twitter Wikiquote (Journalist, author) | |
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| File:Patrick Cockburn.jpg | |
| Born | 5 March 1950 Ireland |
| Nationality | Irish |
| Alma mater | Trinity College (Oxford), Queen's University Belfast |
Irish journalist | |
Patrick Cockburn is an award-winning journalist with The Independent newspaper who specialises in analysis of Iraq, Syria and wars in the Middle East.[1] Cockburn also writes for CounterPunch and the London Review of Books.[2]
Views
Embedded journalism
Patrick Cockburn is critical of embedded journalism, writing in The Independent in 2010
"...There is a more subtle disadvantage to 'embedding': it leads reporters to see the Iraqi and Afghan conflicts primarily in military terms, while the most important developments are political or, if they are military, may have little to do with foreign forces."
He later added
"...Halfway through the Iraq war, one bureau chief lamented to me, saying: 'The only fairly safe place for me to send young reporters, who haven't been to Iraq before, is on 'embeds', but then they drink up everything the army tells them and report it as fact.' The best reporting in any single publication during the height of the sectarian slaughter in Iraq in 2006–07 was in the New York Times, which got round this dilemma by simply hiring experienced and highly regarded correspondents from other newspapers."[3]
Age of endless war
On the relationship between the Covid-19 pandemic and wars, Cockburn wrote in a blog for Verso in 2020
"None of the wars I covered then have ever really ended. What has happened, however, is that they have largely ended up receding, if not disappearing, from the news agenda. I suspect that, if a successful vaccine for Covid-19 isn’t found and used globally, something of the same sort could happen with the coronavirus pandemic as well."[4]
Books
- (1989), Getting Russia Wrong: The End of Kremlinology, Verso Books, ISBN 978-0-86091-977-3
- (with Andrew Cockburn, 1999), Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein, HarperCollins. (British title: Saddam Hussein: An American Obsession, 2002.)
- (2005), The Broken Boy, Jonathan Cape, ISBN 978-0-224-07108-6
- (2006), The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq, Verso Books, ISBN 978-1-84467-164-9
- (2008), Muqtada: Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq, Scribner, ISBN 978-1-4165-5147-8. (British title: Muqtada Al-Sadr and the Fall of Iraq, Faber and Faber, ISBN 978-0-571-23974-0; Muqtada Al-Sadr and the Shia Insurgency in Iraq, Faber and Faber, ISBN 978-0-571-23976-4)
- (2011), Henry's Demons: Living with Schizophrenia, A Father and Son's Story Charles Scribner's Sons Scribner
- (2014), The Jihadis Return: ISIS and the New Sunni Uprising, OR Books, New York: 2014[5]
- Republished (2015), The Rise of Islamic State: Isis and the New Sunni Revolution Verso Books, ISBN 978-1-78478-040-1
- (2016), Chaos and Caliphate: Jihadis and the West in the struggle for the Middle East, OR Books, ISBN 978-1682190289
- (2016), The Age of Jihad: Islamic State and the Great War for the Middle East, Verso Books, ISBN 978-1784784492
- (2020), War in the Age of Trump: The Defeat of Isis, the Fall of the Kurds, the Conflict with Iran, Verso Books, ISBN 978-1839760402