Tips on War Reporting

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War Reporting: Tips and Myths
Thoughts from ajournalism panel on the anniversary of Daniel Pearl's death

By Allison Hoffman
Hoffman, a student at Columbia Journalism School, will graduate in May 2003.
Her e-mail: allie@cotswold.com

MANHATTAN, FEB. 21, 2003 -- A year after the kidnapping and death of Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, journalists are still coming to terms with the risks of reporting from conflict zones as the war on terror continues to unfold.

“Danny’s death changed everything,” said Robert Frank, a senior writer for the Wall Street Journal who spoke on Feb. 18 at a panel discussion sponsored by the Daniel Pearl Foundation and the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. With the prospect of an American-led war in Iraq looming, 60 journalists gathered at the school to commemorate Pearl’s life and to discuss the practicalities of reporting safely from war zones.

Frank, formerly the Journal’s Southeast Asia and Europe correspondent, was joined on the panel by Masood Haider, the U.S. bureau chief of the Dawn, a Pakistani daily; Judith Matloff, author of “Fragments of a Forgotten War” and formerly bureau chief for the Christian Science Monitor in Africa and Moscow; and Kavita Menon, the Asia director for the Committee to Protect Journalists. The event was moderated by Joseph Van Harken, vice president of the Columbia chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists and was co-sponsored by several journalism organizations, including SAJA, the South Asian Journalists Association; AAJA, the Asian American Journalists Association; NLGJA, National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Associaion; and NAHJ, National Association of Hispanic Journalists.

Pearl was abducted and killed last January by agents working for a Kashmiri group with a record of targeting Westerners while on assignment in Karachi, Pakistan. An experienced foreign correspondent, Pearl had been told by his kidnappers that he would be meeting the leader of a different group for an interview. “He got tricked,” Frank said. “The irony of it is that Danny was Mr. Safety at the Journal.”

With Mr. Pearl's help, the Journal had instituted a set of strict safety guidelines for reporters working abroad. The paper also initiated a policy of keeping contact details for reporters as well as their fixers and translators at all times, in order to trigger rapid alerts and responses if reporters were threatened. Even with such networks in place, however, the panelists agreed that journalists working in crisis areas are essentially vulnerable.

“It was a huge tragedy to watch the whole thing unfold and realize we couldn’t do anything to save him,” said Menon, who handled the case for the Committee to Protect Journalists, which monitors the safety of journalists working in various regions of the world. After Sept. 11, she said, the nature of the threat to correspondents and journalists covering the terror beat has become more difficult to pinpoint as the borders of the “war zone” become more diffuse.

With war drums beating loudly in Washington, journalists who have spent the past year adapting to those risks are wary of volunteering to cover a war whose terms, the panelists agreed, will likely be very different than those of previous ones. “Seasoned journalists don’t want this one,” Matloff, who is an adjunct journalism professor at Columbia, told the audience. “They don’t know what they’ll be covering, or what elements will be involved, who the players are, what tactics they’ll be using.”

The panelists debunked several myths about reporting from the front lines of the war on terror, and offered a series of tips for journalists planning to cover the conflict.

Myths

• Journalists have become targets since the war on terror began.
  “We have always been targets,” Matloff said. She noted that journalists had frequently been kidnapped and threatened in El Salvador in the 1980s and in the Balkans in the 1990s. Nonetheless, the risk remains high.

“There is a bounty for the kidnap of western journalists in the border areas of Pakistan,” Haider said. He added that journalists working in many countries are regularly targeted not only by terrorist or paramilitary groups, but by military or government intelligence services as well. He also mentioned the case of a Pakistani journalist who had been detained in the U.S. by the FBI. “It happens here, too,” he said.

• Conflict reporting has grown more dangerous.
  Fewer reporters were killed in conflict zones in 2002 than in any year since the CPJ began keeping statistics, Menon said. Last year, 19 journalists died in conflict zones, against 37 in 2001 (eight of those in Afghanistan). The worst year for journalists was 1994, when 66 journalists were killed.

Frank noted that car accidents remain the leading cause of death for journalists in the field. “The issue is whether journalists are really being targeted by an active policy,” he said. “The problem is that journalists are easily gettable, because they’re out there asking the questions.”

• A journalist's religion is his or her biggest liability.
  While Jewish journalists are at greater risk than most others, in certain regions, being an American of any religion is perhaps the biggest liability. Being a Westerner itself can make you a target. In the case of American Jewish women, it can almost be triple jeopardy. Matloff said, “You are branded as a Zionist, and you have to try and convince them that you’re objective.”

Tips

Before going to a conflict zone:

• Get experience working in high-pressure environments.
  “The key is good judgment,” Frank said. “You develop good intuition about situations, and you judge each one on its own.” Rules and guidelines cannot replace field experience, he noted, and are critical to covering a major event thoroughly.

• Wait before going into a conflict situation.
  “The point is not being the first person there, or in the most dangerous place, but to find the best analysis or angle through different sources," Frank said. He added that, as military tactics become increasingly mechanized and wars grow shorter, the best time for a journalist to go to a conflict zone is after the first wave of battles. “Wait until it’s over,” he advised. “The most interesting story is there.”

• Get training.
  The panelists stressed that journalists ought to remain unarmed in conflict situations, and therefore can benefit from personal safety training before venturing into dangerous areas. A variety of organization-sponsored and private training courses are available for journalists considering an overseas assignment.
  
  
• Secure a satellite telephone or other independent access to communication.
  Matloff emphasized the importance of being able to get stories out quickly and without the threat of censorship from various parties in the conflict area.

• Buy insurance.
  “It’s expensive, but necessary,” said Menon, who said that the CPJ is producing a resource book for journalists going into conflict zones as freelancers.

Once you’re in a conflict zone:

• Be careful - and use your common sense.
  “No story is worth it,” Frank said. “Coming back is the goal.” All four panelists agreed that careful exercise of judgment is the primary weapon journalists have when reporting from dangerous areas.

  In the event that a journalist is threatened, the panelists advised that reporters remain calm and reasonable. “You try to engage people in reasoned discussion,” Matloff said. “But there is a problem of being typecast and seen as objects.”

• Know your fixers.
  Journalists inevitably rely on fixers and translators in foreign areas with help making contacts, conducting interviews, and gaining cultural context. “Do as much research on your fixers as you do on your stories,” Frank advised. The best way to find reliable help is to go through other journalists for recommendations.

• Get out on the ground.
  It is essential for journalists to be on the ground whenever possible to see events firsthand in order to get honest and original angles on their coverage. “Getting out is difficult if you’re beholden to your host, but you try,” Matloff said.

• Travel in groups.
  “Everything you see about competitive edge falls apart,” Frank told the audience. “War reporters stick together, for good reason.” He advised traveling in packs for protection.

• Team up with other reporters to cross-report and verify information.
  “You can only get one side when you’re on the ground,” Matloff said. Access and physical presence are the two biggest blocks to a lone reporter trying to get all sides of a story. Matloff advised relying on reporters working with the other side, as well as editors in the bureau office, to confirm and add essential perspective to stories reported from the field.

• Work with non-governmental organizations.
  For reporters and editors working in bureau offices, international organizations and other neutral observers are often invaluable sources of information. Matloff worried that, in the event that there is a war in Iraq, those people will be asked to leave. “There will be a greater reliance on stringers and freelancers,” she said. Menon noted that while in some cases, local reporters are commissioned to do stories considered too dangerous for western journalists, in other circumstances locals have better and greater access in the field.

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