David Kaplan | |
---|---|
Born | c. 1947 |
Died | August 13, 1992 | (aged 44–45)
Nationality | American |
Occupation | Television news producer |
Organization | ABC News |
Known for | Death in Yugoslav Wars |
Spouse | Sally |
Awards | CPJ International Press Freedom Award (1992) |
David Kaplan (c. 1947 – August 13, 1992) was an American television producer for ABC News, killed while his team was covering the Yugoslav Wars.
On August 13, 1992, on his first day in former Yugoslavia, he was struck by a sniper's bullet near the Sarajevo Airport while driving through Sniper Alley. His team had arrived to interview Milan Panic, the new Yugoslav prime minister.[1] When traveling with the prime minister, however, the armored United Nations car proved to be too small to hold everyone, and Kaplan was moved to a "soft-skinned" (unarmored) van of another television crew. Because Kaplan had no flak jacket, he was seated between two journalists who did.[2]
A few minutes later, a bullet was fired through the tailgate of the van, between the taped letters "T" and "V".[2] Kaplan was not wearing a flak jacket, and the bullet entered his back, severing an artery. He died hours later in a Sarajevo hospital. Kaplan was the first American citizen to be killed in the Yugoslav Wars.[1] The shooter was unknown.[3]
ABC News anchor Sam Donaldson, who had also been traveling in the motorcade, called Kaplan "a good man" who "understood the risks here".[1] US presidential spokesman Marlin Fitzwater described Kaplan as "an honest, fair, talented and creative journalist" and called his death "a very sad and personal loss for all of us who've worked with David".[3] ABC News President Roone Arledge praised Kaplan as a man who had "devoted his life to news and to this organization."[3]
In October 1992, Kaplan was posthumously awarded the International Press Freedom Award of the Committee to Protect Journalists. His widow Sally accepted the award on his behalf.[4] The following year, Sam Donaldson created a fellowship in Kaplan's name at the Missouri School of Journalism of the University of Missouri.[5]
YouTube Encyclopedic
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David Kaplan on the Multiverse and Particle Fever
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Particle Fever with Johns Hopkins University faculty, David Kaplan
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David Kaplan Gravitational Waves Explained
Transcription
Many years ago, many, five, six, seven, eight years ago it was obvious to me and it was really obvious to my entire field, particle physics, that the Large Hadron Collider was finally the experiment that could go to the energy level where we would answer questions that we've been basically asking our entire careers. We were in a state of affairs where the entire population of particle physicists were still active in the field, had never a seen a discovery at this level and we knew it was coming. You could do the calculation and decide immediately that somebody should make a documentary film. And the thing that is coming or was coming was really a statement about how much information about the universe can we get? Does all the information we want, all the things we want to discover about how things work, are they accessible? Is that information, in a sort of goofy way of putting it, is in our universe? Some of the crazier sounding ideas that have been coming out in the last ten years is the idea of a multi-verse. The fact that the laws of physics themselves are not fundamental as we measure them, they're a reflection of one possible way the physical reality could be. And the multiverse is a much more physical example of how you could imagine different possibilities of nature itself could be manifest. Here, where we measure things in our entire observable universe, and then what's outside of it. And while that all sounds very dramatic and exciting, it is both something that scientists can think about in great detail and try to figure out, and sociologically it's a little bit of a nightmare scenario, which is are we going to come to the point in this direction where the numbers we measure and the equations that sort of describe as much of physics as possible were really generated randomly. That they actually came out of a whole bath of the possible laws of physics, and the ones we measure are the ones that generate structure in our universe and therefore life and therefore human beings. And so we are biased by what we measure by the fact that we're here and we're measuring it. That the universe, or part of the universe we're in has enough structure and complexity to produce humans or any sort of observer whatsoever, or at the very least planets or galaxies or stars. So that was the sort of drama, the deep drama that was actually going on in the mid 2000s when I decided that somebody needed to record this event. And what I knew it is whatever the LHC saw or didn't see, it would inform us along those lines. Emotionally it was going to be very dramatic no matter what. We didn't know we would discover the Higgs, that that would be the thing that people sort of hung on to. We the community knew, that this was so big and this was generational that it's going to affect everybody.
References
- ^ a b c "Sniper's Bullet Kills U.S. Television Producer Near Sarajevo Airport". Los Angeles Times. Associated Press. August 14, 1992. Archived from the original on October 25, 2015. Retrieved August 12, 2012.
- ^ a b David Rust (April 11, 2012). "'Sniper Alley' McDonald's shows change in Bosnia". CNN. Archived from the original on May 4, 2012. Retrieved August 13, 2012.
- ^ a b c "U.S. Journalist Is Killed in Convoy to Sarajevo Talks". The New York Times. August 14, 1992. Archived from the original on February 4, 2018. Retrieved August 12, 2012.
- ^ "ABC Producer's Widow Accepts Press Freedom Award". Associated Press. October 22, 1992. Archived from the original on June 2, 2015. Retrieved August 12, 2012.
- ^ Joan Niesen (October 26, 2009). "Master's Student Boris Korby Awarded David Kaplan Memorial Fellowship, Will Intern at ABC Washington News Bureau". Missouri School of Journalism. Archived from the original on April 28, 2012. Retrieved August 12, 2012.