Opinion: How to protect war journalists even as news organizations scale down
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In Tuesday’s Op-Ed pages, ProPublica‘s Kim Barker shared the excruciating experience of learning that her soon-to-be sister-in-law Dorothy Parvaz, an Al Jazeera journalist, was detained in Iran. ‘As a female war correspondent whose friends had been kidnapped by the Taliban, I figured I was ideally suited to handle such crises,’ writes Barker. ‘But I wasn’t.’
In her piece, she describes the feelings of helplessness before Parvaz was released, luckily less than a month after her capture. ‘We don’t know why Dorothy was freed, which magic button was pushed. But we now know what it’s like to be left behind,’ Barker says, who also reflects on the state of war journalism as news organizations scale down.
At least Dorothy had the support of the international journalism community and her employer. What’s happened so far this year -- with many journalists detained, injured and even killed -- is a potent reminder of what’s happened to journalism in the last few years. The world is a more dangerous place. And as major news organizations have scaled back overseas coverage, freelancers have filled the void.This has meant that journalists with very little institutional backing are out there trying to tell the stories of the world, mostly on the cheap. South African photographer Anton Hammerl, shot dead in Libya in early April, was a freelancer. Bauer is a freelancer. No large media organization is pushing for his release.
This week, Parvaz also shared her story with The Stranger in How Reporting Almost Got Me Killed, Before It Saved My Life [via Romenesko]. She explains why she covers the Arab world, how she navigated her interrogations and what she thought about during her detention. For instance:
No. I wasn’t thinking about Lara Logan at all. I was mostly thinking about what I was seeing and hearing. Sharing a cell with a 19-year-old woman who was begging and pleading to be interrogated so that she could be sent home.
Like Barker, she also talks about how important it is for a war correspondent to have a strong network at home.
Were you asked to confess to anything? Well, I was asked to tell the truth. Just tell us the truth and things will go faster. And I said: Yep, absolutely. Ask me any questions. I was very lucky, as well. I didn’t know how much other information this guy was getting besides what he had from Google and me. I had no idea what his sources were. But it really helped my cause, the fact that so many people on the outside were getting my name out. My friends from high school, my former P-Icolleagues, my fellow Neiman Fellows, people I knew from Cambridge from the Wolfson Press Fellowship there, they were consistently putting out these sort of biographical articles about me, which reinforced, from multiple sources, to this man, who I was. And that really helps. […] Are there cases that you think people here need to focus on now, in the same way they focused on your case? I can’t really comment on a specific one, because I think that at this point -- I mean, there’s detained journalists, there’s several of them detained as a result of the Arab Spring, but this is a common problem throughout the world at all times. China, several African countries. This is not unique to the Arab world. And I think that having a free press is one of the most vital things you can have in a country, and when you don’t have that you sort of downgrade your own culture, and your own democracy, and your own credibility.
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Keep female foreign correspondents on the front lines
--Alexandra Le Tellier
