Asra Nomani, the former Wall Street Journal reporter who worked with reporter Daniel Pearl before he was killed in Pakistan, writes in a column for the Washington Post that the journalist she knew gets lost in the Hollywood PR machine that spit out the movie “Mighty Heart.”
Nomani wrote, “Lost in the PR machine and the heroism hoopla is Danny, whose death is at the center of the story. After all, as one person involved in the production candidly told me: Danny can’t do interviews. So in the Associated Press review, he amounts to nothing more than a parenthetical phrase.
“He observed the media machine with a contrarian, skeptical eye. In November 2001, after the war in Afghanistan had begun, he wrote to me: ‘I’m getting to Pakistan just in time for the lull between ‘well, more bombings, more deaths — who cares now?’ and ‘shit, it’s December, we have to round out our prize packages” with big articles for awards such as the Pulitzers. ‘Okay, no more cynicism from here,’ he signed off. ‘I’m going to be a father and must maintain an idyllic view of the world.’
“Danny had me teach him how to say ‘Do I look like a fool?’ in Urdu so he could tell off Mumbai taxi drivers who tried to overcharge him. Once, shortly after arriving in Peshawar on an assignment, he wrote me: ‘I’m at the Pearl Continental, wasn’t able to get a free room despite my argument that I was the owner.’
“Don’t look for that personality in the movie. You won’t find it.”
Read more here. Earlier this month, Nomani establishment of the Pearl Project, a joint faculty-student investigative reporting project at Georgetown University that will aim to find out who really killed Pearl and why.
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Wow. Asra did a great job with that write-up. I was on the fence about seeing the movie -- and this more than helped me make my decision.