In the Danger Zone
WEIGHING RISKS
BY
MICHAEL PARKS
As
a correspondent for Newsweek and The Washington Post, Loren Jenkins
covered wars, large and small, and developed what he calls “a
tolerance for the madness of human conflict.” In 1983 Jenkins
won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on Israel’s invasion
of Lebanon and occupation of Beirut. For twenty years, he walked
through fire and brimstone, he recalls. “To penetrate the
fog of war, you had to get there, to write about what you saw.
Danger was part of the story.”
Today, as senior foreign editor for National Public Radio, Jenkins
talks daily with his correspondents about minimizing the dangers
they face in the Middle East, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, in Colombia
— and about whether the stories they are pursuing are worth
the risks. “I believe in being afraid,” he says. “No
story is worth anyone’s life, but gauging the dangers is
hard.”
Like all senior editors and producers with correspondents in danger
zones, Jenkins bears the heavy moral burden of keeping his people
alive and safe. He also has the journalistic obligation of reporting
conflicts fully and fairly. But the coverage of conflict around
the world is in many ways more dangerous today than in recent
decades.
In its 126 years, The Associated Press has lost twenty-six journalists
in covering conflicts. Nine were killed in the last nine years,
more than during either of the World Wars, or in Korea or Vietnam.
Around the world in 2001, thirty-seven journalists were killed
while doing their jobs, up from twenty-four the previous year,
according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.
Over the decade of 1992-2001, the deaths totaled 399.
‘SAFETY BEFORE STORY’
“More journalists by far are killed in their own countries,
but foreign correspondents, particularly western correspondents,
have increasingly become targets in the types of conflicts we
have now,” says Ann Cooper, CPJ’s executive director
and a former NPR correspondent in Africa and the Soviet Union.
“The safety of journalists, as a result, is an issue for
top news executives — not only for their assignment desks
— and it should be a question for the societies that depend
on the reporting of these journalists.”
With the deaths of nine journalists in Afghanistan last year,
the abduction and murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel
Pearl in Pakistan this year, and the recent attacks on reporters,
photographers, and television crews covering the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, news executives are dealing not only with the safety
of their journalists but also with the more fundamental question
of when a story is too dangerous to cover.
With Pearl’s death, correspondents and their editors understood
that western journalists were now targets. Pearl was taken by
Islamic extremists in Karachi precisely because he was an American
correspondent and killed perhaps because he was Jewish, the son
of Israeli parents who had immigrated to the United States. The
vulnerability of correspondents increased dramatically, posing
difficult questions about what stories to cover and whom to assign.
“There is nothing worse than attending a correspondent’s
funeral,” says Tom Kent, who as AP’s deputy managing
editor and international editor has lost seven colleagues. “Burying
one of your people is a shattering experience, the hardest thing
we do. We go back to work resolved that whenever a story is too
dangerous we will play it safe. The trouble is that there is just
no way you can cover conflicts, terrorism, and wars with complete
safety.”
Correspondents “are taking more risks today, and not always
with their eyes open,” says Simon K.C. Li, foreign editor
of the Los Angeles Times. “This is a result of the types
of stories we are covering. Our people are often the actual targets,
not just ‘collateral damage.’ We do tell them, ‘Be
careful out there.’ I don’t think that comes naturally
to all correspondents.”
To senior news executives like Jenkins, Kent, and Li, the most
important safety measure for journalists is a very sober assessment,
day by day, even hour by hour, of the dangers posed by a particular
story. Steve Coll, managing editor of The Washington Post and
a veteran of conflicts in the Balkans and South Asia, says: “The
first principle must be safety before story. There must be lots
of consultation up front, and we need to listen to our best, most
experienced correspondents as they evaluate the environment. Above
all, correspondents must feel absolutely free to say ‘no,
not this one’ without fear of being thought cowardly, or
losing the story to someone else, or being pulled out.”
The Post, like many other news organizations, has bought armored
cars (the current price in Israel: $80,000, partially refundable
if returned in good condition), flak jackets, helmets, and other
protective equipment. Many newspapers and networks also are reviewing
the life, health, and war-zone insurance they provide staff members.
“We are acutely aware that nothing can make a reporter completely
invulnerable,” Kent says. “No flak jacket, no helmet
will stop a high-velocity bullet fired at short range. An armored
car won’t deflect an anti-tank round. Experience counts for
a lot. A flak jacket is important for safety, but you might be
murdered for that very jacket. Sometimes you want to look local
and blend in, and other times you want to stand out as not part
of the scene.”
To provide that street sense, more news organizations are sending
their reporters, photographers, and television crews to hostile-environment
training given by retired military and security personnel. The
British Broadcasting Corp., Reuters, and the AP took the lead
in insisting on such training. AP alone has put about 400 of its
staffers through programs that it has either contracted for or
run itself. The next step, some editors believe, will be psychological
counseling for those returning from conflict zones.
“We have gone through the agony of losing someone, and we
are acutely aware of what that means,” says David Scott,
international editor of The Christian Science Monitor. (The Dutch
journalist Sander Thoenes, a stringer for the Monitor and the
Financial Times, was murdered in East Timor in 1999, reportedly
by Indonesian soldiers.) “Consequently, we plan to put all
our people, including our veterans, through hostile-environment
and first-aid training, and we budgeted for it. This is about
getting better, more professional judgments in a world that is
a more dangerous place for journalists.”
Paul Rees, a veteran of the British Royal Marines, whose Centurion
Risk Assessment Services Ltd. has trained about 8,000 journalists
in the past seven years, says that his current week-long, $2,400
courses are “definitely not intended to turn the folks into
soldiers, but to make them very aware of their circumstances and
to walk through typical scenarios—the roadblocks, sniper
fire, crossfire, the ambush — and talk about what options
they would have.”
In many conflicts, correspondents hesitate to go down a road if
there are no children out playing, or to enter a village where
stores are closed and shuttered. They learn to finish their reporting
before mid-afternoon if they’re in a war zone where the nights
are dangerous. They search out hotel rooms least exposed to hostile
fire or ricochets. They collect phone numbers, even those of pay
phones, from places too dangerous to return to. They get press
cards and passes and letters of introduction from leaders on all
sides of a conflict — and learn to keep them in separate
pockets lest they pull out the wrong one at a roadblock. Even
non-smokers carry cigarettes to bribe their way through checkpoints.
And most correspondents tuck away a number of just-in-case $100
bills.
Every conflict, however, has its own rules that govern how reporters,
photographers, and especially television crews can move around,
how close they can get to the front lines, whom they may interview,
and how they will be treated. Sometimes government information
officers make the rules, and sometimes military commanders do.
Sometimes, it is militia or guerrilla leaders, but at other times
it is simply men with guns who make life-or-death decisions. Four
journalists who were shot and killed between Jalalabad and Kabul
in Afghanistan in November were on a road that had been safely
traveled. They were in a convoy like those they had used in the
Balkans, but gunmen stopped and killed them.
THE RULES GOT CHANGED
“What is appropriate varies from place to place, time to
time, and you want to get it right from the outset,” says
Frank Smyth, a free-lancer who has covered wars in Central America,
Africa, and the Middle East and was captured and imprisoned for
eighteen days while covering Iraq’s crackdown on the Kurds
in 1991. He now travels to Colombia to report on narcotics trafficking
and relies more on the techniques of investigative reporting —
particularly the collection of documents — than the “cowboy
style” he favored a decade ago. “I made my name doing
guerrilla trips in El Salvador and traveling with the Kurds and
Shiite opposition in Iraq,” he said. “I wouldn’t
do it again. The unpredictability must be underscored. Many journalists
have been killed while following the rules, but the guys with
guns weren’t acting within the known parameters, or had simply
changed them.”
Managing those risks, however, requires journalists, their editors,
and producers to reassess and perhaps reduce their competition
with other news organizations and to accept that on some stories
it’s better to get beat than to get killed. “The wire
does not need a story from the street every day,” Kent says.
“Some days, it is better to go down in the basement and stay
safe. We pulled out of Somalia and Sierra Leone temporarily, and
there are other places, like the southern Philippines, that are
important but where we go with the utmost caution.”
After Daniel Pearl’s murder, some media critics questioned
whether his editors at The Wall Street Journal were exercising
sufficient caution. Was the investigative story he was working
on — trying to connect the suspect in an attempted bombing
of an airliner to Islamic radicals in Pakistan — worth pursuing?
Should the paper have assigned an American Jew with Israeli parents
to an Islamic country? Paul Steiger, the Journal’s managing
editor, describes Pearl as “very careful, very experienced,
not at all a cowboy” and says he was in daily touch with
his editors under a safety protocol that Pearl himself had helped
develop for correspondents in dangerous areas. “We haven’t,
and we won’t, determine assignments based on ethnicity or
religion,” Steiger says. “But we are telling our people
that, if because of your background you don’t want to continue
on an assignment or would rather turn it down, we won’t think
less of you.” News executives at other organizations take
similar positions and note that the long-standing barriers to
assigning Jews to the Middle East fell more than twenty-five years
ago.
Journalists need to be honest with themselves about who they are
and why they take on foreign assignments. “There is a whole
journalistic culture — you go after the story, you do brave
stuff, and never do you want to be seen as a wimp,” says
CPJ’s Cooper, recalling her own reporting days in Somalia
and West Africa. “It is really not enough for editors to
say it’s your choice to stay or leave. They have to make
clear there are no penalties for pulling out. They also have to
get their correspondents to assess the situation for themselves.”
IGNORING THE EDITORS
Robin Wright, a veteran of conflicts in the Middle East and Africa
as a correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor, the Sunday
Times of London, and CBS News, and now the diplomatic correspondent
of the Los Angeles Times, says that journalists’ differing
motivations affect how they face danger. Some specialize in war
reporting, caught by the adrenaline that comes from the danger.
Others see themselves as covering contemporary history, witnesses
to human drama and political change. Others have found international
reporting to be a beat that interests them far more than any domestic
story. “Foreign correspondents tend to be driven — they
want to be on page one,” she says. “It’s pretty
hard for them to stand down unless the risks are just too great.”
Correspondents and editors often disagree about the importance
of a story and the acceptability of the risk. The Los Angeles
Times correspondent Paul Watson remained in Kosovo through the
1999 war, including the NATO bombing, despite the strong misgivings
of his foreign editor, Simon Li, who felt that Watson should have
pulled out, as had reporters for other American news organizations.
But Watson, now covering South Asia, felt a strong obligation
to report the story as Serbian forces drove hundreds of thousands
of Albanians from the province and NATO then bombed the Serbs
into an eventual retreat. NPR’s Jenkins ignored Newsweek’s
orders to leave Saigon in the days before it fell, and left only
when the U.S. ambassador did. But in Beirut in 1985, when Islamic
militias were snatching western reporters, including AP’s
bureau chief, Terry Anderson, Jenkins stayed away from the city.
The heightened dangers are prompting news executives to reexamine
not only how they cover much of the world’s strife but, more
fundamentally, why they do. Does a particular story matter? Is
there a U.S. national security interest? Will the conflict alter
international relations? Are the risks of coverage greater than
the story’s relevance?
The AP’s Kent says the agency has not done as much frontline
reporting on a number of stories as it wanted because of danger
to reporters and photographers: the nationalist rebellion in Chechnya
against Russian rule, civil wars in Somalia and Sierra Leone,
several coups elsewhere in Africa. “These stories were important,
and some still are, but we can cover them only within our ability
to do so safely. If a situation is too dangerous to report on,
there’s no point in sending someone. You do so when the risks
are manageable.”
The dangers facing correspondents covering radical Islamic extremism
allowed only the most limited coverage before the September 11.
Militants had made Algeria, Upper Egypt, and the southern Philippines,
as well as much of Afghanistan, virtual no-go areas for Western
journalists through much of the past decade. “There was a
very powerful fountainhead of the Islamic revival in Algeria that
we could not really cover because of a deliberate policy of killing
journalists and foreigners there,” says The Washington Post’s
Coll. “The transnational Jihadist movement was growing, and
it was too dangerous to cover. We need to rethink how we do these
very dangerous but very important stories.”
LOSING THE OBSERVER
Those stories break not only in the Middle East, Africa, Afghanistan,
and Pakistan, but also in Colombia, where journalists can find
themselves trapped between rightwing militias, leftist guerrillas,
and narcotics traffickers; in Indian-controlled Kashmir, where
Muslim nationalists have taken Western hostages; in the southern
Philippines, where Muslim separatists have taken foreigners hostage
and killed some; and even in Mexico, where a correspondent for
the San Antonio Express-News was murdered in 1998.
Yet when the international press is not present and watching,
terrible things often happen, says Ann Cooper: “wholesale
violations of human rights, brutality on a scale that is hard
to imagine, major atrocities, genocides even.” Much of the
material introduced at the war crimes trials at The Hague and
Arusha, Tanzania, came originally from the reporting of journalists.
“Wars are huge and important stories, not only because of
what may be at stake in the conflict but because of what happens
to the civilians,” Cooper says. “If we don’t go
and report, any general or commander or dictator can do whatever
he wants, and international norms of behavior collapse.”
The 1994 Rwandan genocide in which 700,000 people were killed,
Steve Coll points out, did not get first-hand coverage initially
because correspondents were forced out. “By expelling foreigners,
including reporters, a singularly murderous colonel succeeded
in buying time, roughly from April to July, in which hundreds
of thousands of people died,” Coll says. “If the press
had been there, international intervention would have come sooner.
We had no choice but to withdraw. Yet, this is a clear case of
why we accept many of the risks of covering conflict.”
Paul Van Slambrouck, editor of The Christian Science Monitor and
a former correspondent in Africa, acknowledges that even at his
paper, which devotes about half of its newshole to international
reports each day, covering danger is always a tough call. “There
are continuing upheavals in Africa,” he says. “They
are far away. Do Americans really care? Then I ask myself if the
better question is, ‘Should they care, and how can we make
the story relevant?’ I do worry, on behalf of our readers,
about stories that don’t get covered, or covered well. Will
we have crucial knowledge gaps in our understanding of the world?
What we don’t know can truly hurt us, as we found out on
September 11.”
Michael
Parks, former editor of the Los Angeles Times, is the director
of the School of Journalism at the University of Southern California.
He was a foreign correspondent for twenty-five years, and won
a Pulitzer Prize in 1987.
