WEIGHING THE RISKS
Foreign Coverage: The New Math
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.”
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