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Kathy Gannon is the chief designate of the Associated Press Iran bureau, and was the AP correspondent in Pakistan and Afghanistan from 1986-2005. She has covered Afghanistan for nearly 20 years, including the seizure of power by the Taliban in 1996 and its defeat in 2001. She is the author of I is for Infidel, a book about her experiences in Afghanistan, and was the 2002 recipient of the International Women’s Media Foundation Courage in Journalism Award and the recipient of the Edward R. Murrow Fellowship from theCouncil on Foreign Relations during 2003-2004. She has been published in The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs and The New Yorker.

Gannon was this year’s Atkinson lecturer at the Ryerson School of Journalism in Toronto. She spoke about how the international press often gets its facts wrong about the Middle East. “It’s our job as journalists to look beyond the official line,” she said, noting that since 9-11, many reporters have stopped asking “the right questions.” The lecture was followed by a Q&A encounter between Gannon and the young journalists in the audience, during which Gannon pointedly voiced her opinion of the role of embeds in war coverage.

Read RyersOnline’s account of the lecture.
Watch an “intimately observed history of Afghanistan from 1986 to the present” presented by Kathy Gannon at the University of California, Santa Barbara on November 7, 2005

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Ryerson Review of Journalism

This is a joint byline for the Ryerson Review of Journalism. All content is produced by students in their final year of the graduate or undergraduate program at the Ryerson School of Journalism.

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