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Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould
gould.fitzgerald@verizon.net

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, a husband and wife team, began their experience in Afghanistan when they were the first American journalists to acquire permission to enter behind Soviet lines in 1981 for CBS News and produced a documentary, Afghanistan Between Three Worlds, for PBS.

In 1983 they returned to Kabul with Harvard Negotiation project director Roger Fisher for ABC Nightline and contributed to the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour. They have continued to research, write and lecture about the long-term run-up that led to the US invasion of Afghanistan.

As the horrors of the Taliban regime were beginning to grab headlines in 1998 they began collaborating with Afghan human rights expert Sima Wali on media projects. They contributed to the Women for Afghan Women: Shattering Myths and Claiming the Future book project www.womenforafghanwomen.org/events/book/book.html. In 2002 they filmed Wali's first return to Kabul since her exile in 1978. The Woman in Exile Returns, the film they produced about Wali's journey home gives audiences the chance to discover one Afghan's vision for her people.
They are featured alongside Zbigniew Brzezinski, Stansfield Turner, John K. Cooley, Benazir Bhutto, Noam Chomsky and Jack Blum in an award winning documentary by Samira Goetschel. Titled, Our Own Private Bin Laden, it traces the creation of the Osama bin Laden mythology in Afghanistan and how that mythology was used to maintain the "war on terror" approach of the Bush administration.

 

 

Contributions

A history of failed press coverage of Afghanistan
COMMENTARY | October 27, 2009
For decades, the American news media by and large have been simplistic and misleading in reporting U.S. relations toward Afghanistan, write Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould. From 1981 on, they say, the press has kept vital information away from the American people.


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