'Sacrificed at the Altar of Commercial Enterprise'

That's the verdict of a friend of murdered Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl, referring to the new movie A Mighty Heart. Here's another article on the movie by the same journalist, Asra Nomani.

I didn't know Pearl or seen the movie, so I can't speak to whether the movie is faithful to his life or not. But I do know that the way the movie was made was certainly not.

I was in India when the movie was being filmed in the town of Pune, and the Indian media was filled with accounts of thuggish treatment of locals and journalists by Angelina Jolie's security men. One airline steward, who worked on a plane hired to transport Jolie and her entourage, told me about how he was roughed up by a British "security" person, employed by the actress, after he dared to use his cell phone camera to photograph the delicate princess.

Here's a Newsday article about how a photographer got similar treatment. Were he alive and covering that event -- he was New Delhi bureau chief, remember -- Pearl might have been subjected to similar treatment.

© 2007 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

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Wall Street Versus America was published by Penguin USA on April 6.
Click here for its Amazon.com listing and here for more information on the book, from my web site, gary-weiss.com.