Journalist Robert Fisk happened to live in Beirut, very close to the place where Lebanon's Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was ambushed in a car bomb attack. He recounts:
And what happened was that I -- I ran down the road towards the scene. It was obviously a car bomb. I mean, I have been 28 years here, I know a car bomb. And I arrived at the bottom of the road. Many people were running in the other direction, some of them had blood on their clothes and obviously in a state of considerable distress. And I turned the corner towards the -- into carnage. There were cars burning, in all I counted 22 at the end of about a half hour there. Pieces of body parts in the road. I saw two, three people in all burning inside vehicles. There was a very big man lying on the pavement, whom I thought must have been a passer-by. I realized a few hours ago, actually, it was almost certainly Rafiq Hariri, but someone came and put a checkered blanket over him and he was taken away.
This is the kind of reporting that is hard to come by. Mr.Fisk ran into the eye of the danger zone as soon as he could. I remember a report of him on the streets of Belgrade during the unrests while the CNN reporters were watching safely from the balconies of their hotel. Large media houses in the U.S. prefer to show satelite images while their reporters are embedded or at a safe distance.
Kudos go to Robert Fisk for his exceptionally good reporting.