Marie Colvin was a self-confessed risk-taker. Such people are often difficult to be around, totally dogmatic about their own views and ready to erase others in their path.
But as with Steve Jobs in his field, she did have an unremitting dedication to excellence,so that the risk-taking was never applied to what she wrote (Johann Hari and Jayson Blair being examples of morally despicable journalistic risk-taking.) On the contrary, she learned to mould and channel it into delivering news from beyond the edge of possible, and that’s an awesome achievement.
I’m glad to see that all the mainstream news sources are giving her the headline tribute she deserves, and that Cameron & Miliband stopped the Punch n Judy show to pay tribute to her. It’s of course awful to think of all those lives being wilfully crushed and snuffed out just to keep that murderous dictator, his goons and cronies and his couture-clad wife in security and comfort. And she did as much as anyone to put some of those painfully and pitifully stamped out lives before us.
But it is so very sad to try and take in that we will never be reading or hearing from her again.