From WNYC in New York, this is on the media.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield.

For months, forces allied with Iraq have battled to take back the Iraqi city of Mosul from the Islamic State.

There's no end in sight.

We're in the center of Mosul, a little way east.

And behind me, it looks like a scene of a Steven Spielberg film, except this is for real.

That is the voice of no ordinary battlefield reporter.

Hello there.

I'm John Cantley, the British citizen abandoned by my government and a long-term prisoner of the

Islamic State. British journalist John Cantley was kidnapped by ISIS in Syria, along with American

freelance reporter James Foley in November 2012. Foley was beheaded. Cantley's head was preserved.

I'm going to show you the truth behind these systems and motivation of the Islamic State

and how the Western media, the very organization I used to work for, can twist and manipulate that truth.

Periodically, he pops up in ISIS propaganda either as captive or playing a reporter

determinedly as if his life depended on it, which of course it does.

In the earliest videos, he's dressed in the orange jumpsuit his fellow journalists were wearing when they

had their throats slit by the man the media dubbed Jihadi John. In those first few videos,

he's sitting at a desk looking at the camera. In later clips, he's a roving reporter out on the

street. In the most recent video released on December 13th,

Cantley has a scraggly beard.

He looks emaciated.

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