Martin Langfield's Blog

Here’s an article I wrote recently about cycles of generational violence and trauma for my good friends at News Decoder. It’s about El Salvador, where I worked in the early 1990s, but it could be about many other places too. Repression and violence breed future trauma, and where trauma is unresolved there is no lasting peace.

My 1990 Reuters piece (as printed here in the L.A. Times) was prescient, sadly, about the mental fallout of El Salvador’s civil war. May other warring nations do better.

I wrote a piece on Latin America’s protests in late 2019 – and why they matter, especially to young people – for my good friends at News-Decoder.  Here’s a link! I think it stands up quite well still.

Photo by Martin Langfield, Chihuahua, Mexico, 1986.

(I took this photo more than 30 years ago at an opposition hunger strike to demand fair elections in Chihuahua, Mexico in 1986.)

Reuters journalist Danish Siddiqui was killed on Friday while covering a clash between Afghan security forces and Taliban fighters near a border crossing with Pakistan. This gallery showcases some of his best work.
— Read on mobile.reuters.com/news/picture/i-shoot-for-the-common-man-danish-siddiq-idUSRTXEG1OW

Professional spooks know what a powerful tool disinformation is.

She was an intelligence analyst at the CIA. Now she writes about the dangers of ‘fake news.’

Professional spooks know what a powerful tool disinformation is.

She was an intelligence analyst at the CIA. Now she writes about the dangers of ‘fake news.’

Important work here from the good people at First Draft:

My former mothership Reuters has announced the expansion of its award-winning e-learning course on helping newsrooms around the world spot deepfakes and manipulated media in 12 additional languages.

This is an excellent resource, instructive for anyone interested in learning how to spot real fakery and manipulation.

My former mothership Reuters has announced the expansion of its award-winning e-learning course on helping newsrooms around the world spot deepfakes and manipulated media in 12 additional languages.

This is an excellent resource, instructive for anyone interested in learning how to spot real fakery and manipulation.

Shocking, I know, but here are 14 sensible recommendations for the upcoming U.S. elections and an executive summary that will take maybe two minutes to read. What are some other exciting words? Pragmatic. Non-inflammatory.  Feasible. Worth a read.

Fair Elections During a Crisis: Bipartisan and Diverse Blue-Ribbon Group of Scholars and Thinkers Releases Report on Urgent Changes Needed for November U.S. Elections

— Read on www.law.uci.edu/news/press-releases/2020/fair-elections-report.html