No one knows for sure if Khashoggi is dead and Friedman revealed him as an anonymous source who provided quotes critical of the Saudi government with no concern for Khashoggi’s friends and family who could be targeted in retaliation. Unbelievably careless. nytimes.com/2018/10/08/opi… Nowhere in this Tom Friedman piece will you find an apology for or retraction of that saccharine “Saudi Arab Spring” column. In fact, this reads more like a long justification of that column than a plea on behalf of his dead or kidnapped friend. What NYT editor let this through?

@SusanSarandon @ejbeals @jimmy_dore Ms. Sarandon, I don’t doubt you mean well. But you need to listen to people who’ve been reporting on this war since it started and have seen these things with their own eyes, not propagandists with an agenda. Our friends died there, not yours. Please have some respect for them. @SusanSarandon @ejbeals @jimmy_dore The people you’re promoting constantly attack and harass journalists risking their lives to report on Syria, just like James Foley did. Most of us are freelancers like him. Some physically endanger me by calling me a liar and a spy and reporting me to Hezbollah for my work.

#MeToo, except it was 11 years ago and he succeeded. I didn’t tell anyone either. Why are we letting old men dicate the conversation about how abused women should handle their assaults? How about we just listen to the women?

https://twitter.com/wolfe321/status/1042084656181587969?s=21

*dictate, you all know what I mean

Went to an NFL game for the 1st time in years. Heightened security was unsettling. Only clear plastic bags allowed, hands in the air at metal detectors, armed police everywhere. Such militarization of a recreation venue is more suited to a war zone. We live in unacknowleged fear. An unspoken acceptance that we’re always at risk of being targeted by a mass shooter when we gather in groups is now ingrained in our culture—just an everyday reality of our lives. We station snipers at entertainment centers. We arm teachers at school. And we change nothing.

This is insane. Money from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries has been funneled to radical Islamist groups in Syria for years, including those fighting the U.S. independent.co.uk/news/world/mid…

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1030935164178903044?s=20

A little story about Gulf funding in the Syrian conflict: in 2013, I reported a story for @foreignpolicy on Roumieh, a notorious Lebanese prison that was being overrun by Islamists. Many had been caught in transit to or from Syria to fight in the war. foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/02/bei…

I’d love to see Brian explore a very important, usually overlooked aspect of our current media environment—the gradual death of foreign news and the gaping hole in coverage left by the complete unsustainability of freelance journalism

https://twitter.com/brianstelter/status/1028657875944501251?s=21

Seriously @brianstelter has one of the smartest media analysis platforms out there but I just Googled “Reliable Sources CNN foreign news” and came up with zip. The decline of foreign coverage, especially in the Trump era, is a hugely important piece of the modern media landscape.

How do you think her policy knowledge compares with the President of the United States? If 2016 taught us anything, it’s that there is an enormous gap between the level of competence and expertise expected of men and that of women.

https://twitter.com/natesilver538/status/1027577021646426113?s=21

I didn’t intend to go on a rant with this but now that I’m all fired up, here goes. As a young woman, I can tell you from experience how many of my professional interactions begin with the assumption that I have no idea what I’m talking about, and I don’t think I’m alone here.

A thread about cyclical hatred. I was recently in rural Virginia, which has historically been a solid red region of the country. The town I was visiting is overwhelmingly poor and white. Trump signs were on almost every lawn and casual racism is an everyday occurrence there. I happened to meet a little girl of eight years old on my visit. Upon first glance, she was a badly behaved child. She was clearly rebellious, lied compulsively and was always in trouble for fighting with other kids. But I took some time to sit and talk with her.

I know reporters who gave their lives to tell the truth about war. My father gave seven years of his freedom. How dare this man who wouldn’t serve his country when he was called upon, who hasn’t even been to visit our troops in the field, tell us we cause war. I am literally shaking with rage. He is spitting on the memories of our dead colleagues. He is making a mockery of their sacrifice. How can any reporter be objective in the face of such gnawing malice?

Please stop telling me not to answer misogynist trolls. I know most of you mean well but I ignore about 80% of them to begin with. If I answer it’s because I want to. By telling me I shouldn’t, you’re taking away my agency and contributing to a process that robs me of my voice. By lecturing women that they should ignore misogynistic attacks online, you’re also helping to create an environment that triggers shame in us for our perfectly understandable impulse to stand up for ourselves, and that only serves the interests of our attackers.

If we can’t sustain outrage at these events for more than a few days, if journalists let themselves immediately move on to the next trending story, we should recognize that we all play a role in allowing them to continue.

https://twitter.com/sulomeanderson/status/1020689199442333697?s=21

Think about how long Watergate was in the news. Iran-Contra was covered for years. Journalists dug into these stories. They built on each other’s reporting. I realize we all have scandal fatigue but the media has a responsibility to keep each outrage in the public eye for longer.

Thread on what it’s like to be a freelance foreign correspondent in 2018. I recently pitched a story to a prominent magazine about refugee returns to Syria. The editor I was speaking with said they were very interested but needed more pre-reporting before they could commit. For some background, UNHCR is running out of money to aid refugees & has been cutting services for them. The EU, Canada and of course the U.S. are taking in hardly any. This has led to a push by overwhelmed countries neighboring Syria to send them back to the war zone they fled.

Tips for being a human being on social media:

1) When someone posts something you find dumb or offensive, ask yourself if they did it maliciously or not.
2) If not, consider approaching them privately with your concerns instead of joining in on a troll feeding frenzy. 3) If you decide to respond publicly, consider whether you’re being courteous and constructive or just trying to score points at someone else’s expense.
4) Decide whether you’re adding something to the discussion that this person hasn’t heard in a thousand abusive ways already.

On #WorldRefugeeDay I'd like to remember and thank every displaced man, woman and child I've interviewed. They did not owe me their stories, but gave them freely. I will never stop being grateful for and honored by their trust in me. I only wish I had more to give in return. The best I could do for these people was try my hardest to share their stories with the world and I will continue to do so. In that spirit, here's a collection of my refugee pieces from over the years:

Thread: Max Blumenthal's lawyer Bill Moran deleted this, but the Internet remembers. The irony is that I was chiding he and Blumenthal for making frivolous libel threats against @splcenter & @areidross in March. Now I actually have a viable libel case against Blumenthal & Norton. I strongly feel that journalists shouldn't sue each other for libel under 99% of circumstances. It impedes the function of a free press. But Blumenthal and his cronies have been mounting a coordinated attack on journalists and activists for years & the public deserves to know why

Thread on something interesting I recently learned. As most of you know, last night, I tweeted two videos a source gave me, claiming they were of Israeli airstrikes in Syria. They turned out not to be, so I deleted them and tweeted a correction, but there was an important lesson. When a different source provided me with a video claiming that it was of Iranians firing back at the Israeli-held Golan Heights that same night, I was understandably wary and decided to try something new. I crowd-sourced the verification process.

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I meant to tweet this a while ago but never got around to it. It's going to be a bit of a long thread, but bear with me because I think it's important. This is a story about war, what it does to people who witness it and the lessons we can learn from them. Here we go: I was riding in an Uber in NYC a few months ago. I usually strike up conversations with all my drivers, because I do that with almost everyone I meet. It’s how I get half my story ideas. Anyway I got to talking with this driver and he tells me he’s Senegalese.

Thread. All journalists who cover conflict have defining emotional moments of their careers, and I imagine many never make it into print, so I'm going to share one of mine here. In October 2016, I was interviewing Yazidi women in Iraq who had been enslaved by ISIS for a @foreignpolicy piece in which I also interviewed two captured ISIS fighters. Link here: foreignpolicy.com/2016/10/11/wom…