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Media Matters
April 18, 2003
What Is it Like to Cover a War?
By Jeffrey A. Dvorkin
Ombudsman
National Public Radio
Some listeners ask what it was like for NPR's Anne Garrels in Baghdad. While many listeners have a good appreciation of the difficulties and dangers, others seem to think that reporting from a war zone is like attending a political convention -- just with slower room service. Far from it. There seems to be a gap between the popular idea of what goes into war reporting and the reality... a reality that is far from the Doonesbury satire of Roland P. Hedley III.
Yet the image persists. In fact, covering a war is about planning for what is known and anticipating as many unexpected scenarios as possible.
Planning for War Coverage
Each news organization takes its own approach. But they share a number of concerns and considerations.
The most important thing is to avoid being caught by surprise. Serious news organizations would have been following developments and reporting the story long before the outbreak of hostilities.
Experienced editors and reporters have a feel for what may happen. They stay in touch with their colleagues in the field as well as with other journalists and experts who may have recently returned from the region.
A close second is logistics and technical planning. This includes everything from air tickets, hotels and ground transportation. Arrangements are usually made in advance to obtain a press permit from the embassy before departure. If no embassy exists, a press permit is obtained at the airport on arrival. Editors also discreetly arrange for war zone insurance to be taken out on behalf of the reporter.
Local Hires or 'Minders'
Additionally, the reporters may have to employ local people who are known as "minders" who act as guides, as well as make arrangements for interviews, translations and in some cases, bribes. Sometimes, the hiring of "minders" is a condition of admission to the country, as was the case in Iraq.
In Iraq, these "minders" were there often to spy on the reporters and intimidate any people who are interviewed. Reporters often attempted to slip away to do interviews without the "minder." The reporters in Iraq were expelled from the country as the price for being caught. The person being interviewed faced a worse fate.
New Radio Technology
Radio as a medium requires additional demands. The technology has gone from being almost non-existent, to cumbersome, but is now more compact and reliable.
A few wars ago, radio reporters had to rely on the availability of telephone lines and the willingness of the telephone operator in the hotel to keep trying to get an outside and then an overseas line. A reporter of my acquaintance kept trying to call from his hotel room in Ankara. After 11 hours, he finally reached his newsroom only to be told by a harassed copy clerk, unaware that phone lines from Turkey are at a premium, "We're busy now. Call back later." The copy clerk then promptly hung up on the correspondent.
Fast forward to today. Radio reporters are each equipped with a satellite telephone that is about the size of a laptop. They can be operated by plugging them into any electrical outlet including a car's cigarette lighter. Some can operate on solar batteries.
This gives the radio reporter tremendous mobility and the ability to report live from the scene. Unlike our colleagues in television, radio technology has allowed for a level of independence and freedom to maneuver.
The Real Cost of War Reporting
That freedom depends to a large extent on local conditions.
American reporters who go on their first overseas assignment quickly realize they "aren't in Kansas anymore."
The range of differing standards ranges from the petty to the outrageous:
In Britain, members of Parliament expect to be paid to be interviewed.
In post-Soviet Russia, the banking system and the ruble had collapsed and foreign reporters often had to carry enormous amounts of cash -- preferably in U.S. dollars for all transactions.
In Somalia during the early 1990s, Western-based reporters assigned to cover the U.S. and allied expedition found that freedom was mostly chaos. Reporters were "encouraged" to hire local, heavily armed guards to avoid being kidnapped. Shake-downs for money or equipment by warlords were an everyday occurence.
Apocryphally perhaps, there is a story told about news organizations who when they left Somalia were shaken down again. The BBC and U.S. TV news teams paid handsomely to get out. When the NPR correspondent tried to leave, the warlords asked which news organization she was with. "NPR," she said. "And I don't have any money. But I'll send you coffee mugs and tote bags." They let her go without paying. She apparently did send mugs and t-shirts to Somalia once she was back home.
Other shake-downs were harder to avoid. The local communication infrastructure -- phone lines, satellite uplinks, etc. was strictly controlled by government-owned telecommunication companies. These "telecoms" charged exorbitant rates to Western media since it was one of the few sources of hard cash available in many of these places. Deregulation has eliminated some -- but not all -- of the more notorious excesses of the "telecoms."
As risky as running out of money was the censorship. In China during the Tiananmen Square uprising, television and radio circuits were frequently cut when the Chinese government saw pictures that appeared to make heroes of the students. The plug was pulled even more quickly if the pictures appeared to cast the government in a bad light.
War reporting, like other reporting, is about making choices. The obvious difference is that much more is at stake in war reporting, not the least of which is the safety of the reporters and those who work with them.
CNN's Dilemma
In last Sunday's New York Times, Eason Jordan, the head of CNN's news division, wrote about the dangers CNN faced in Baghdad over the past ten years. Jordan wrote that Iraqis employed by CNN were threatened, brutalized and some were killed over the years.
CNN reporters were regularly expelled from Iraq, yet CNN continued to report from there.
Many journalists (and some NPR listeners) were scandalized. They accuse CNN of playing footsie with the regime while giving a sanitized version of Iraqi reality as the price for doing business.
NPR's Senior Foreign Editor Loren Jenkins responded to that concern this way: "Of course we asked about human rights abuses. Sometimes we were told of them but most times, even without a minder present, people were reticent about talking in too much detail about such things for fear of retribution." And, he points out "when minders inhibited reporting, it was mentioned in the reports."
Some critics say that Western journalists who are intimidated by a regime should speak up. Rather than keep an emasculated journalistic presence, the Western media, they say, must expose the pressure and the threats.
In a memo to CNN employees, Jordan says that in Iraq, that was never a viable option for a journalistic organization: Read the memo.
Accusations of intimidation are not new. NPR has been accused of being pressured by both Palestinian gunmen and the Israeli Defense Forces in its reporting from the Middle East. Reporting from a war zone is always a tense endeavor. Correspondents (for the most part) have come to expect some pressure. When does that pressure become intimidation? And how well prepared are journalists and their editors to handle it?
Handling the Pressures
Were I in Eason Jordan's place, I'm not sure I would have done it much differently. To leave would have meant in some "macho" journalistic circles that CNN couldn't take the pressure. But to stay runs the risk of endangering your employees while appearing to collaborate for the sake of a presence in the region. These are not easy alternatives and involve some terrible journalistic choices.
War reporting is -- to say the least -- a risky business. And in this endeavor, the role of the editor is critical. The job of the editor is to encourage and help the journalist get and shape the story. Editors sometimes must choose between getting the story while assessing the level of danger to the journalists -- often from thousands of miles away. Editors have to be able to tell when the story is starting to feel "soft" and that's when they look for other ways to tell the story from outside the war zone.
Editors also have to know when to keep the reporters in place and when to pull them out. They also have to listen to what the reporter is saying -- to sense if the pressure of the story on the reporter is still manageable. When the arrangements become too dangerous, news organizations have an obligation to admit it. This may go against the more macho traditions of foreign reporting, but Jordan's confession has made us deal with it.
Jordan made a judgment call based, I'm sure, on all of those elements. But Jordan's candid admission has also called into question how other news organizations -- including NPR -- respond to the pressure.
It's easy for the armchair editors to be critical of news organizations who must make tough choices in the field. The question for CNN -- and NPR -- is if those choices affect the journalism, are the listeners still getting the news they need? And if they aren't, should we admit that? And how can it be best resisted?
Eason Jordan has done all of journalism a favor by speaking out. News organizations need to admit that it goes on, and work together to find a better way of dealing with it. The listeners deserve no less.
Listeners may contact me at 202-513-3246 or at ombudsman@npr.org.
Jeffrey Dvorkin
NPR Ombudsman
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