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Practicing journalism in a smaller, riskier world

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Practicing journalism in a smaller, riskier world

By Frank Smyth

                I’m old enough to have handled Moveable type — long, rectangular pieces of steel or lead with a letter, character, number, punctuation mark or space forged at one end. In 1976, at 15, I had a part-time job as a letterpress clerk at my hometown weekly. I worked the metal pieces of type into clamped blocks to fit into a letterpress machine. It sat in the basement near the newer, bigger printing presses that inked the newspaper. My old machine was about 5 feet tall and weighed maybe a ton. Each time I pulled down its handle, it inked out onto an envelope the mailing address of a college student or someone else who still wanted to read the town paper even though they lived out of town.

                I’m young enough to have never used anything but a computer to file from overseas. Nearly every foreign correspondent by 1988 used a Tandy 200 from Radio Shack. A laptop before anybody coined the term. It had no hard drive and only 24 Kilobytes of RAM –just enough to save one story at a time. There was no Internet. The Tandys had a built-in modem with settings for pulse or tone that we used to direct dial a newspaper’s main frame computer. Pulse was about the only setting that worked abroad. You had to pay out of pocket and hope to get reimbursed later for long distance calls, and you had to exactly match the settings of stop bits, character bits, and parity each time to get in.

                Printing presses inked out text in different written languages for over a 1,000 years, and, in more recent centuries, gave rise to the term we still use for news outlets: the press. Computers have been around for about 30 years, and they have revolutionized the world of news and information. The craft of journalism is the same: attempting to verify information before reporting it, being transparent about what could and could not be verified, and providing context. But many other things are different.

                Technology has made the impact of reporting and other communications more immediate. Earlier this year, Egyptian police and militia detained or attacked foreign correspondents from every conceivable outlet. Before he fell, President Hosni Mubarak tried to literally unplug Egypt, shutting down satellite connections, cell phone service and the Internet. Back in the 1960s it took at least a few days for film shot in Vietnam to be flown to New York, developed and broadcast. Now what may be a fresh report to the public back home may serve as a real-time intelligence report to combatants.

                The public perception of journalists has changed, too. At home Americans have steadily lost respect for journalists over the past quarter century. Little more than a quarter of Americans say news organizations get their facts right, and about 60 percent say they are biased. Overseas actors of all kinds have grown increasingly hostile to journalists. Back in the 1980s in Central America journalists routinely wrote TV in large letters in masking tape on their vehicles to help deter attacks. Today few journalists would be so bold to do so in almost any region of the world.

                Many journalists in the past also operated with the sense that they were journalists first. But in recent years many journalists have been targeted over their nationality, ethnicity or religion. Everyone knows the case of then-Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl. But Western journalists comprise only a relative handful of all journalists killed anywhere around the world. Atwar Bahjat was an Iraqi correspondent for Al Jazeera and later Al-Arabiya, based in Doha and Dubai, respectively. In 2006, Bahjat and her TV crew were reporting at a major Shi’ite shrine right after it was bombed. Gunmen in a white car arrived on the scene demanding to know the whereabouts of the on-air correspondent. Her remains and those of two crew members were found the following day bearing signs of torture.

                One’s nationality, in particular, can be a two-way street. Stephen Farrell is a British national working for The New York Times. In 2009 he and an Afghani journalist working as his fixer, Sultan Munadi, were captured by Taliban combatants. (Hostage takers, too, have learned how to Google to glean information about their captors.) British authorities told Farrell’s family member and New York Times editors that they were weighing options before ordering British special forces to mount a surprise rescue operation. U.K. authorities said they did so to try and save the one British national. U.K. soldiers rescued Farrell but the Afghani journalist Munadi was killed along with an Afghani woman and one British soldier. This and other cases show how hard it is for journalists to maintain that they are journalists first anymore.

                But one thing has stayed the same. Local journalists continue to be, and have long been the journalists most at risk. Nearly 90 percent of journalists killed around the world are killed within the borders of their own nation. The Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya repeatedly exposed human rights abuses before she was shot to death in the elevator of her apartment building. The Sri Lankan journalist Lasantha Wickramatunga criticized his own government and foretold his own death before eight helmeted men on four motorcycles beat him with iron bars and wooden poles. He died a few hours later.

                Consider these two rarely reported facts: A local journalist is murdered somewhere around the world at least once every 11 day; the murderers get away with it in nearly nine out of 10 cases. Journalists tend to be violently attacked in open states or nations that are at least nominally democratic. They include Iraq, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Colombia, Afghanistan, Nepal, Russia, Mexico, Pakistan, Bangladesh and India.  Here’s another underreported statistic: Government officials of one kind or another have killed nearly as many journalists as have terrorist groups and other armed rebel forces, according to research by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, from which other data here not otherwise attributed is taken.

                In closed societies or nations run by a single political party or another absolute entity, outright censorship and imprisonment of journalists is common. Iran, China, Eritrea and Burma each top the latest list with the most journalists in jail. About half of them are behind bars on anti-state charges like terrorist collaboration, espionage, or propagandizing against the state.

                Two more trends reflect other new changes in news and information. More online journalists are behind bars today than either print or broadcast journalists, and nearly half of all the journalists languishing in jails around the world are also freelancers.

                At the same time, wars remain dangerous beats to cover. Many journalists have been killed or injured on the battlefield. More than 200 journalists and media workers have been killed or injured in Iraq alone since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. Fire from U.S. military forces killed 16 journalists among them. That figure also includes two Iraqi photojournalists working for Reuters killed in a helicopter attack firing in an area that included armed men. The U.S. military’s own video of the attack later surfaced on the anti-secrecy information network WikiLeaks. The video showed the helicopter killing or critically injuring other civilians, including children.

                Sexual assaults and rapes of female journalists is another concern that has recently been brought to light. The sustained sexual assault of CBS Chief Foreign Correspondent Lara Logan in Cairo during anti-government protests in Egypt shocked many observers, but some were less surprised.

                Women who are veteran journalists came forward one after another detailing their own experiences with groping and more severe sexual assaults by crowds of men in different nations.

                Technology has no doubt made the world a smaller place. But it is one at least as dangerous, if not more so, than before.  “Why then do we do it?” asked Sri Lanka’s Wickramatunga, a husband and father of three children, shortly before his own murder. “But there is a calling,” he answered, “that is yet above high office, fame, lucre and security. It is the call of conscience.”

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Frank Smyth is a freelance journalist and the journalist security coordinator of the Committee to Protect Journalists. Smyth’s clips are at www.franksmyth.com. Visit CPJ at www.cpj.org.

This piece originally appeared in the Montana Journalism Review, Vol. 40, Summer 2011
http://issuu.com/montanajournalismreview/docs/mjr2011

Journalist security: An evolving field

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Original story ran on the Committee to Protect Journalists blog.

The garden city between the mountains and the sea founded by Vikings in 871 cast an historic hue over the discussion. Journalists from nearly every continent gathered this past weekend to discuss journalist security issues in a hotel in Tønsberg, Norway, outside of which a replica of a Viking ship was being constructed.

Marcela Turati is a Mexican journalist who explained that she never expected to cover violence or organized crime. The founder of Mexico’s first group established by journalists to help each other, Journalists on Foot, she perhaps set the tone when she tossed aside the bravado that often accompanies such forums and frankly said, “We need help in how to handle our fear.”

The journalist security community only began to identify itself as such less than a decade ago in the wake of events since 9/11. It remains an emerging field which now seems to have at least as many questions as answers.

For years journalist security was associated with “hostile environments and emergency first-aid training” provided by private security firms led and staffed almost exclusively by former British military personnel. Such skills remain invaluable for journalists covering ongoing conflicts in nations like Yemen or Libya, or ongoing wars in nations like Afghanistan or Iraq. But one fact remains: In every single nation in conflict around the world–including in both Afghanistan and Iraq–more journalists have been murdered outright than have been killed in combat or other circumstances like suicide bombings.

“I’ve taken one of those classes,” said Kirstin Solberg, who is based in Pakistan for the Norwegian daily Aftenposten, referring to a battlefield awareness and first-aid class. “They help,” she added. “But there are many things they don’t cover.”

Take a matter like how to handle coverage of organized crime. Javier Garza, editorial director of the Mexican newspaper, El Siglo de Torreón, said that he and his colleagues are literally making it up as they go along. They have no doubt earned credibility along the way. Rotating reporters in and out of crime beats to lessen their own stress and make them less of a target, and removing bylines as needed are among the steps he and his colleagues would recommend to others.

But covering organized crime in a nation like Mexico poses another set of challenges. Don’t identify by name the groups involved in shootouts, arrests, or raids, Garza recommended. Take violent stories off the front page as much as possible. In other words, Garza explained, don’t allow yourself as journalists and news outlets to be a conduit for criminal groups seeking to use the press to pass on grisly messages as a way of flaunting their strength to one another.

Or take the issue of sexual assault against journalists. Most of the paramilitary and emergency first-aid courses offered by private security firms did not include separate training or awareness on how to avoid sexual assaults. The journalist security community took most of their cues from these military-oriented experts and courses. Yet, some relief agencies working in unpredictable, field situations have long included sexual assault avoidance and awareness as part of their security training curriculum.

Or take the issue of stress reactions by journalists covering violent or traumatic events. The Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma only began offering fellowships to journalists in 1999. Since then, the journalist trauma awareness community has worked to have the matter integrated into journalist security training curriculums. Another security concern for journalists that has become only more apparent in recent years is the need for digital information and communications security. How to protect notes and documents on your hard drive, like how to safely communicate with sources and editors are increasingly complex questions in an interconnected world of ever-evolving technology.

Whether it’s safe or even wise to be either on Facebook (or to be too transparent on it) was one of the last points of discussion. Afterward, I noticed that my friend and colleague, the Mexican editor Garza, posted a picture on Facebook of the Viking ship replica being built outside the hotel.

Frank Smyth is CPJ’s Washington representative and journalist security coordinator. He has reported on armed conflicts, organized crime, and human rights from nations including El Salvador, Guatemala, Colombia, Rwanda, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan, and Iraq. Follow him on Twitter @SmythFrank.

April 7, 2011 2:10 PM ET