Article in last Monday's Guardian

[Simmir]

Anyone have any comments? Struck me as rather humourless and PC...

www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,997925,00.html

[Peter]

It struck me as deeply offensive to Croatian people. People like her do not belong in any decent country. Their views are so twisted that only a paper as bizarre as the Grauniad would employ them. No-one who has visited Croatia would recognise the gross distortions she describes. If her report is in any way true she must have been either advertising for the town weirdos or her group must have been pissing off everyone around.
Wasn't it a Grauniad team that years ago in the former Rhodesia threw a handful of coins into a dustbin, then filmed black kids diving for them and claimed they were starving and having to find food in dustbins?
This sort of distorted news coverage is the ultimate reason why thousands of people are now really starving in Zimbabwe. They brought down the existing government and replaced it with Mugabe!
The Grauniad would be a joke if it wasn't a disgrace.

[Angelo]

We actually received two messages from people who are actually Serb or of Serbian origin. They also think the article is a disgrace!

[Simmir]

Encouraged to see that others share my reaction. Reminds me too of that dreadful Irish journalist (Maggie Kane??) who did a documentary in the "From Our Own Correspondent" slot on BBC 2 a few months ago called "Looking for Karadzic". This mind-numbingly dim egotist also thought she was a one-woman War Tribunal/bounty hunter who would get to the "truth" of where Karadzic was hiding simply by going into bars and offering bags of money to people who would show her where he was. For weeks she was led a goose chase by wily Bosnian-Serbs, but she never wised up or lost her pomposity and humourlessness. At one point she even interrupted a Catholic Mass to accuse the High Priest of harbouring Karadzic! It was lousy journalism but hilarious TV. Oh yes, and then there's the ghastly Yvonne Ridley and her "My Burqa Hell living with the Taleban". These people demean journalism.

[Anja]

Julia Pascal is not a journalist. She is an actress "on mission in Croatia"..
We hope her travelling theatre goes all around the world to tell us the hidden truth about the world’s mysteries.
I guess the next episode would be her blogging from Iraq and the next to next one -story about the life of kids in Palestine. The Afghanistan follows.
I am sure she 'll be there. Watch the space..

[Simmir]

You're right in one respect - Julia Pascal is most definitely not a journalist.

Her "mission in Croatia" is... ...what exactly? And what is this "hidden truth about the world's mysteries" she is seeking to uncover?

Can we look forward to her appearing on Channel 4 News to tell us she and her brave troupe of actors have tracked down Saddam's weapons of mass destruction backstage at the Basra Hippodrome?