Journalist at war in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, the story of a reporter who is sent to Afghanistan, based on The Taliban Shuffle: Strange days in Afghanistan and Pakistan, a memoir by Kim Barker. Staring Tina Fey, as Kim Baker, this is not your typical war story; we get to see it all from her perspective, as Kim Barker told it, with a little dark humor.

Going into it, thinking it was just a normal comedy movie; I was pleasantly surprised by the dark humor used to tell a true story of a journalist in a real war. It’s a side of war we, the audience, don’t typically see; but we should. We need to know what’s really going on, why men and women are putting their lives in danger, what is being done. See how a war involves two sides, not just one. We see that we can’t always blame the other side, because both are in it.

It also shows that we see the news through a filter, what the editors want us to see, not what’s really happening, as we are shown in this film. We don’t get some stories because the big audience may be tired of this, nobody wants to show it, or just because they don’t bring in money. Filters like these can apply to any news coverage of any story, and that make people think we are the good one’s, but that’s not always the case.

It takes brave people to share their stories, to help others see the big picture, not just the narrow images shown on the news.