Media Musings: Journalists risk their lives to serve
Just as the nation paused to celebrate Thanksgiving, I would ask you pause as well to honor the hundreds of journalists – world-wide – who are trying to report from some of the darkest and war-torn places in the world.
It’s perfectly understandable that media have focused on the dead and wounded from the war in Iraq, but there are others who have died and been wounded as well with only cameras and microphones and pens and satellite phones to protect them.
The Associated Press has reported that U.S. soldiers are “becoming more aggressive in their treatment of journalists covering the conflict.” AP reported reporters have had their news equipment confiscated, some have been detained, and others have suffered “verbal and physical abuse while trying to report on events.”
Last month, the International Federation of Journalists, based in Belgium, filed a complaint over the harassment of reporters, saying some had even been beaten since the fall of Saddam Hussein. The federation represents some 500,000 journalists from more than 100 nations.
Thirty media organizations have told the Pentagon of their dismay about the harassment of journalists. While this sounds understandable given the war is now a guerilla action, shooting at journalists with machine guns and aiming tanks at them shows how skittish the troops really are.
In truth, the Pentagon is trying to clamp a lid on reporting. When a major bombing occurred and CNN’s crew began moving in, the troops blocked them telling them reporters should honor the dead. That’s even worse than Vietnam’s lies, really.
No reporter of any repute wants to dishonor the dead. They want to tell the story as best they can given the conditions which surround them.
Another way to look at this is to say it really does honor those men and women who have died for the United States and its few allies by showing this nation the truth. To give the people Pentagon propaganda or to deny the effectiveness the guerrillas did have initially stains the ultimate sacrifice these men and women made.
They would want the truth to be told.
There is no more vivid example of the cost of reporting than the death of Daniel Pearl, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. Pearl was trying to interview Sheikh Murarak Alie Shah Gilani, the man who taught shoe bomber Richard Reid the art of terrorism.
He was lured to his death by Omar Sheikh, well known for his kidnappings, who has been arrested and confessed to the kidnapping of Pearl. He was an intimate of bin Laden. Sheikh is a British-born Pakistani who graduated from the London School of Economics but when he saw the slaughter of Muslims in Bosnia became a radical.
There are many wants to interpret the current state of coverage in Iraq. But a hard-eyed view of this shows a Pentagon scared of the American people, worried every hour of every day about the re-election of President Bush, and hopeful a sanitized news treatment will make us less inclined to become more and more unhappy or embittered by the secret decision to take the Middle East one nation at a time.
Our best hope lies in the dedicated reporters who’re fighting to see and know the truth and report it back to the few serious news organizations left and courageous enough to take the wrath of irate readers, listeners and viewers when they do their job. And I know, too, that they will be called “traitors” by some ideologically driven networks.
Journalists report not to win your approval or mine. They report because they – at their best – believe they can still serve the people.
(Ed Kimbrell is a professor in MTSU’s School of Journalism.)