Reporting from the Danger Zone

Frontline Journalists, Their Jobs, and an Increasingly Perilous Future

Maria Armoudian

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317556848
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Journalism is a dangerous business when one's "beat" is a war zone. Armoudian reveals the complications facing frontline journalists who cover warzones, hot spots and other hazardous situations. It compares yesterday's conflict journalism, which was fraught with its own dangers, with today's even more perilous situations—in the face of shrinking journalism budgets, greater reliance on freelancers, tracking technologies, and increasingly hostile adversaries. It also contrasts the difficulties of foreign correspondents who navigate alien sources, languages and land, with domestically-situated correspondents who witness their own homelands being torn apart.

1 Introduction

Why Ethical Journalism Matters

They were less than an hour south of the Turkish border. Freelance journalist James Foley, photojournalist John Cantlie and their translator stopped at a café in Northern Syria to transmit their reports. An hour later, the men hailed a taxi, climbed in, and headed north. They never made it. Masked gunmen in a van overtook the taxi’s left side, forcing it to a halt. The gunmen screamed as they leapt from the van. They forced the two journalists to the ground, handcuffed them, and hauled them into captivity (Callimachi 2014). The abductors, members of the “Islamic State” (also ISIS or ISIL), who took over swaths of Syria and Iraq, tortured Foley with beatings, water-boarding, upside-down hanging, and mock executions, before publicly beheading him (ibid.).

Foley was the second of five journalists decapitated by an extremist group and one of the 1,185 journalists who have been killed on the job since 1992, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) (2016), which gathers data on attacks on journalists and media freedom. Although violence against journalists is not a new phenomenon, the trend has worsened. The year 2012, for example, saw a 33 percent rise in journalist slayings, according to Reporters sans frontiers (RSF) (Reporters without Borders 2012), 43 percent according to CPJ (2012, 2014). The death toll is accompanied by a 37 percent rise in abductions (to 119) between 2013 and 2014, notes the group (Reporters without Borders 2014). In addition to the abductions and deaths, hundreds more have been imprisoned or exiled (CPJ 2015). Local journalists bear the brunt of the violence and slayings, accounting for more than 75 percent of journalists killed and imprisoned, according to CPJ and RSF, the latter of which found 90 percent of journalist abductions were locals (Reporters without Borders 2014).

The attacks signal a dark era for journalism and a stark departure from previous decades when combatants, at minimum, tolerated journalists, treating them as civilians, and often sought their sympathies. Convincing journalists of “our” righteousness and “their” wrongness was part of the information wars¹ that run parallel to the physical wars. Rebels, freedom fighters, and others relied upon journalists to tell their stories, and relay their grievances and perspectives to the rest of the world in hopes of boosting their legitimacy, gaining international sympathies and persuading audiences of the virtues of their causes. The Irish Republican Army (IRA), for example (covered more in Chapter 5, “Living in a Danger Zone”), carefully crafted communication campaigns and cultivated relationships with local and international journalists to help win support for their cause (Armoudian 2011, 2013).

Many factors have changed the equation, among them, the internet. With new communication technologies, sophisticated fighters no longer need journalists to tell their stories, instead they disseminate their unfiltered messages and frames directly to the public, free from the check of independent journalism. And though the internet also gives voice to oppressed citizens to communicate outside of closed borders, it has simultaneously empowered groups such as the Islamic State to expand their reach to persuade and terrorize (see, for example, Klausen 2015).

In this new equation, journalists are part of the story, rather than conduits of stories. The harrowing public displays of their deaths are part of the information wars waged by extremists. Designed to horrify and terrify, gruesome public killings of correspondents capture attention, induce grief across the globe, and project a sick form of power. And alongside the rest of their campaigns, extremist groups such as the “Islamic State” persuade potential recruits to join their cause.

Simultaneously, they generate an eerie silence, as the rash of killings and kidnappings have persuaded journalists and their managers to opt out of covering dangerous territories and groups. After a dozen deaths just within the first 10 years of the twenty-first century, then Reuters Editor-in-Chief, David Schlesinger, called for a new, more cautious approach to danger zone journalism. “We have to say ‘no’ more often. We have to be prepared to miss the image more often. We have to be ready to lose the shot to avoid being shot. We must be ready to lose some stories to avoid losing yet more lives,” he said (Schlesinger 2010).

During Schlesinger’s leadership, after Reuters journalists Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh were gunned down in Iraq by US Apache fighters, the company adopted a policy that journalists must not stand next to armed, non-uniformed persons. But Schlesinger argues the policy does not go far enough. He advocates that editors “should be opting to ‘pass’ on more stories more often,” and instead rely upon “the great democratisation of technology.” Simultaneously, he advocated for training, including similar avoidance, for local citizen journalists who blog and tweet and “might rush in to the very danger spots we should be avoiding” (ibid.).

Other news organizations are adopting related policies. Agence France Presse (AFP), for instance, stopped sending journalists into rebel-held parts of Syria, a region it deemed too risky to cover. “Journalists are no longer welcome in rebel-held Syria, as independent witnesses to the suffering of local populations. They have become targets, or commodities to be traded for ransom,” declared its Global News Director (Léridon 2014).

Simultaneously, AFP sought to discourage freelance journalists from losing their lives by announcing that it would no longer accept any freelance journalists’ work from those regions.

We no longer accept work from freelance journalists who travel to places where we ourselves would not venture. It is a strong decision, and one that may not have been made clear enough, so I will repeat it here: if someone travels to Syria and offers us images or information when they return, we will not use it. Freelancers have paid a high price in the Syrian conflict. High enough. We will not encourage people to take that kind of risk.

(ibid.)

The profession, its professionals, and those of us who rely upon them are at a crossroads. The threats add to an already encumbered institution, beleaguered by shrinking journalism budgets, dismantled foreign bureaus, and diminished foreign news coverage. Alongside long-term economic pressures, the trends further reduce the capacity of news organizations to deliver much-needed understandings about these developments.

What might the costs of avoidance and reduced coverage be? Can the costs be properly assessed? The absence of responsible journalism can have broad effects. As I wrote in my previous book, Kill the Messenger: The Media’s Role in the Fate of the World, extremist control of information and framing aided the twentieth century’s worst atrocities, including the Rwandan Genocide, the Nazi Holocaust, and the Bosnian War. Genocidal leaders used mass media to disseminate Blame Frames, Hate Frames, and Genocidal Frames to justify mass slaughters of innocent people as “solutions” for political problems and a means to achieve “noble” ends. These messages were weapons in the arsenal of the rhetorical wars, in aid of the physical wars of guns and bombs (Armoudian 2011). In Rwanda, Nazi Germany and parts of the former Yugoslavia, in the absence of ethical journalism, extremist ideas and frames went unchallenged and became the dominant narratives (ibid.).

Ethical journalists see through the frame wars. They seek to witness events, analyze developments, untangle truth from propaganda and provide nuanced understandings, ultimately countering extremist messages. At its best, responsible journalism impacts life and death by helping people better understand the complex realities of conflicts, informing their decisions with accurate, contextual information. They help policymakers prevent misinformed deadly errors. For these reasons and more, international conventions, news organizations and human rights groups seek to protect and expand media freedoms toward unfettered access to information (see, for example, Reporters without Borders 2015).

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Roy Gutman reiterated some consequences he reported in the book, How We Missed the Story: “If we [journalists] missed the story, then the literate readers, the educated citizens, and even the politicians, and those in power, leaders, missed the story,” he explained. “Afghanistan was one of those places we [journalists] should have put on the map” (Gutman 2014).

Proper investigation of Afghanistan during the 1990s could have better informed and prepared decision-makers long before the 9/11 attacks, argued Gutman.

So what are the consequences? You can’t blame 9/11 on journalists. But you can say that the response, the very stupid response, the very unmeasured response and the excessive, wrong response by the Bush administration was aided by the fact that nobody knew what had happened prior to 9/11. Nobody had the narrative. Nobody understood the origins of Al Qaeda’s grip on Afghanistan. And there’s a hugely important gap, I thought, in people’s knowledge of what preceded 9/11. And you need to know that in order to know how to really cope with these terror groups that now thrive and have now metastasized to other places, because the wrong response is not just counter-productive, but literally leads to the wrong thing.

(ibid.)

Today, Gutman points to Syria where, again, informational black holes abound, and history threatens to repeat itself:

So here we are. The biggest, most deadly war on earth where the most war crimes are occurring daily, where you have a regime basically going after civilians. And then you have the Islamic State, one of the most rapacious and extremist groups ever to be seen on the planet. And we are not going in and covering it … Now people do get tired of wars. They go on for a long time, so it’s hard to interest the public in something going on this long. But nevertheless there are ways. But not being there is not one of the ways. Not being there makes it infinitely harder.

(ibid.)

This also goes some way to explain why journalists have become pawns in this real-life game of thrones. Obviously, killing journalists stops independent observation and prevents much analysis, knowledge of transgressions and dissemination of deeper understandings about complex issues arising in conflicts. It stops the check on propaganda, while their publicized murders also send a message of horror and power, chilling other potential observers—ultimately, the most extreme means of controlling information.

Extremist groups are just one of many players in the information wars. All war-makers use information and control of information as part of their arsenal in the battlefield of our hearts and minds. They restrict access; they “spin” and censor information, and they wage a war of ideas through their own media to persuade, entice, advocate, and project, as reflected by the markedly different reports that come from, for example, state-owned media such as RT, BBC, Al Jazeera or commercial media such as Bloomberg or CNN (see for example, Rodgers 2012). While reporting on the Ukraine conflict, veteran correspondent Carol Williams observed the phenomenon directly: “You get two diametrically opposed versions whether you’re reading Russian media or whether you’re reading Ukrainian media,” she said. “There are just alternative realities that are unfolding there, according to the [respective] media” (Williams 2014).

Williams covered the conflict in Crimea, which she called “a good thing, because there were a lot of lies.” But as the conflict spread, she said, “Nobody is covering everything” (ibid.).

Instead, with news organizations increasingly reluctant to send correspondents to the region, Williams and colleagues are left to a “kind of blogging and doing what I call ‘the practice that used to be known as plagiarism.’ I just feel really uncomfortable. Even though I’ve been to all these places, it’s just not the same, rewriting about them and sourcing it to a Ukraine news agency,” she said (ibid.).

In the age of diminished direct observation, the practice that discomforts Williams has ostensibly spread to other news agencies.

I thought it was just The LA Times … But The New York Times has someone doing exactly what I’m doing. What they’re relying on is the news media of the country where the event is unfolding. And they may not be as reliable and balanced and fair as I would be.

(ibid.)

Despite advocating to avoid dangerous regions, Schlesinger acknowledges the looming problems, including misunderstandings arising from the inability of journalists to interview combatants, “That means that you never get a very full picture of the other side. You end up demonizing an entire people, and an entire movement because you don’t actually get any of the nuance” (Schlesinger 2014).

Technology, however, has also filled some information gaps. While foreign news has diminished in the pages and broadcasts of traditional news organizations, information continues to flow, so much so that journalist and professor Michael Parks believes there is “more reporting done now” than when major newspapers had many remote bureaus. The difference today, he said, is “you just don’t find it in your morning paper. You find it on your morning screen” (Parks 2014). In Syria, for example, he noted that he could “follow the war” with specialty websites.

There is a website that follows attacks on women, very detailed—attacked, raped, whatever, abducted; Human Rights Watch, very detailed reports; International Crisis Group, very detailed; citizen journalism … There’s a ton of stuff. However, what you don’t have is as many people attempting to integrate it and with the point of view of Americans’ interests. You have to do it yourself.

(ibid.)

Through social media sites, such as Twitter, audiences “piece together” events as they happen, “instead of going to a news outlet,” added Vice News Editor-in-Chief, Jason Mojica.

And [that’s] not to say that a news outlet with a slower more methodical approach wouldn’t have. I’m sure they ultimately did provide a cleaner, more accurate version of events. But I guess the difference is there was that immediacy. It’s kind of the newspaper being yesterday’s news versus being able to follow in real time what was happening.

(Mojica 2014)

Collectively a “powerful tool,” social media brings additional problems, including unfiltered information, which translates to “It could be true or may not be true,” noted Mojica (ibid.). This has created another challenge for danger zone journalism—verification (discussed more in Chapter 6, “The First Casualty”).

This book, Reporting from the Danger Zone, explores some of these complications of danger zone journalism, how journalists deal with them, and how the job is changing. Based on more than 30 interviews with danger zone journalists past and present, i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: Why Ethical Journalism Matters
• 2. On the Origin of Stories
• 3. The Foreign Correspondent’s Afflictions
• 4. Staying Alive
• 5. Living in a Danger Zone
• 6. The First Casualty
• 7. Conclusion
• Some Helpful Resources for Journalists
• Index