Libya's Women War Reporters Speak Out

Every war has a media face: Kate Adie in the Gulf conflict of 1991, John Simpson in Afghanistan in 2001, "Scud stud" Rageh Omaar in Iraq in 2003. But the particular media focus for the Libyan revolution was that the first three reporters into Green Square, Tripoli, were all women: Crawford, Sara Sidner, of CNN, and Zeina Khodr, of al-Jazeera English -- much to their surprise.

Says Khodr: "I was really shocked by the focus in western media on female reporters -- there's been nothing like that in the Muslim press."

So is it patronising, irrelevant, sexist even, to mention Crawford, Sidner and Khodr's gender? Or can the fact that three women were at the forefront of media coverage of a revolution be worthy of discussion about how that revolution was perceived? A new book about reporting the Arab Spring, out next month, aims to look at this.

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