Independent Media: Fact or Fiction

By FIMS Communications, December 2024 | Winter 2025 FIMS Asper Fellowship

The Faculty of Information and Media Studies (FIMS) is pleased to announce that Kathy Gannon, award-winning Canadian journalist, author and former news director of the Associated Press for Afghanistan and Pakistan, has been named the Winter 2025 FIMS Asper Fellow in Media.

Gannon spent nearly four decades reporting international news from Afghanistan and Pakistan, Israel, Iran, Iraq, Yemen and other locations in the Middle East and Central Asia. She was on hand to cover the US-led invasion of Afghanistan post 9/11, for a time being the only Western journalist allowed in the capital city of Kabul, as well as covering the more recent withdrawal of US forces from the region in 2021 and the subsequent return of the Taliban to power. Gannon was critically injured on the job in 2014 when an Afghan police commander opened fire on her and photographer Anja Niedringhaus in eastern Afghanistan. Gannon was hit by seven bullets and Niedringhaus, a close friend of Gannon’s, was killed.

Gannon has been outspoken about the importance of independent reporting in journalism and has warned against the industry trend of journalists and news organizations taking positions – overtly or not. As someone who has witnessed world events from the frontlines, she has seen firsthand how it erodes the ability of reporters to provide trustworthy, factual information to audiences, and leaves the door open for unchecked abuses on the part of Western governments and other powers.

"The job of the journalist is to inform and to provide an understanding to the readership. I don't disagree that we all have biases and points of view, and we need to recognize and acknowledge those but not with the aim of integrating them into how we do journalism. Our aim should be to understand how to separate them from our journalism."

In recent years, Gannon has been taking her message to post-secondary institutions in an effort to merge the realities of ground reporting with the theory being presented in classrooms. In 2022 she served as the Joan Shorenstein Fellow at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, and she also gave the commencement address to Columbia School of Journalism’s Class of 2022. Now she’s preparing to get into the classroom with students from FIMS and says she is looking forward to the challenge.

Fact box

Kathy Gannon in a blue and white striped shirt

In 2023 the Coalition For Women In Journalism established the CFWIJ Kathy Gannon Legacy Award to honour distinguished women journalists who are breaking barriers and exhibiting bravery.

Gannon is also the author of I is for Infidel, From Holy War to Holy Terror, published in 2005 by Public Affairs, New York, New York.

“After decades overseas, I wanted to return to Canada for an extended period. But more, a university, the caliber of the University of Western Ontario, offered me the opportunity to see whether the classroom provides a way to reclaim some fundamentals of journalism, which I believe are being compromised,” she explains.

Gannon will be teaching a graduate-level course during the Winter 2025 term titled “International News, Independent Media: Illusion or Reality?” The course will use international news, specifically coverage of conflicts like the ongoing Israel/Gaza war, to examine how deeply independent reporting has been compromised and what the ramifications might be. She says the seepage of terms like ‘fake news’ into the public consciousness has “left readers wondering what to believe, but worse it has given space to those who would sell lies as truth.”

As a separate component of the fellowship, Gannon will embark on a study of local (London and area) news coverage of the conflicts in Gaza and the West Bank to better understand the impact of a shrinking local news industry. She plans to look in-depth at coverage in the first three months of the war, a month in the middle, and the three most recent months, in an effort to plot changes over time. She also plans to talk to the Jewish and Palestinian/Arab communities in London to gauge how they feel they have been represented in the local media.

Gannon hopes that this will allow “students to see and understand the choices made by the local news outlets, but it also speaks to the impact international news has on local communities. I think it would make a great piece for a journalism-related publication like the Columbia Journalism Review, in which I would like to see it published.”

Ultimately, Gannon wants her students to come away with a more nuanced view of a complex world and to see how “an open, compassionate mind that seeks to understand rather than judge offers the best hope of finding the information needed to help the news-consuming public better understand our world.”

As for what Gannon herself will take away from the Asper Fellowship, she says she hopes to simply find “a renewed hope for our profession.”

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To find out more about Kathy Gannon or to read her work, visit:
https://www.kathy-gannon.com 
https://kathygannon.substack.com 

Gannon also paid tribute to Anja Niedringhaus at the 2024 Canadian Journalists for Free Expression Gala, in a video that is available on Youtube.