In the wake of the semi-successful rescue of New York Times correspondent Stephen Farrell, a certain degree of mean-spiritedness has emerged that suggests that it is not worth risking the lives of soldiers to save journalists held hostage. It is the depressing social trend that prefers to blame the victim when one realises that to do the right thing may require some exertion and sacrifice rather than just smug soundbites.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in a deeply unpleasant column of Stephanie Gutmann, one that beggars belief considering her proclaimed desire for greater transparency in the Arab-Israeli conflict.
The article opens with one of those cringe-inducing qualifiers:
Certainly war reporters must take risks, as Con Coughlin points out. Certainly the people who elect to do it are very brave. Certainly we want war coverage. But so often one senses an undercurrent of self-indulgence and sanctimony and that a reporter’s illusory moral high ground, his pretence that he is a free agent, is purchased with the blood of others.
“”Certainly” etc. etc.” is here employed as just a means of diminishing an important part without addressing it. By conceding the necessity of risk-taking, she attempts to evade a sensible discussion of the nature of necessary risks in war journalism.
War reporters take risks, yes, but risk is not the entirety of the argument. Reporters in these environments have to work in a difficult, murky environment in which the obvious decision is not readily apparent, and is usually surrounded by other plausible choices and scenarios. Did Steven Farrell make the right decision in staying despite warnings of the approaching Taliban? Evidently not. Was it so obviously the wrong decision at the time? Unlikely. Mr. Farrell may well have heard such warnings many times previously, for them to turn out to be overly cautious. Are Stephanie Gutmann and the other sideline jeerers really qualified to be so judgemental with the benefit of hindsight? No. The idiocy she spouts in the rest of her article only confirms this.
She goes on to suggest that war reporters would be better served by either all becoming embedded correspondents, or by hiring armed guards to accompany them. The lack of understanding of the realities of war reporting here alone ought to disqualify her from making any further comment. First, embedding, though a useful journalistic source, can never provide a full picture of what goes on in war. War correspondents need to move beyond their own lines and into enemy territory and no man’s land to gain a better overall view of the conflicts they seek to explain. An embed can, at best, only provide half the story. It would be a violation of journalistic duties to neglect telling the other side of the story. We need the Ghaith Abdul-Ahads of this world as much as the Michael Yons.
Still, veteran of touring a few ships and inhabiting the well-known warzone called Manhattan that she is, Gutmann decides that trying to get a full picture is not worth bothering with:
No, the fundamental problem with too many reporters in the field is… that they believe objectivity is possible and that one achieves this independence of mind by going around without the protection of the armed forces of one side or the other.
This is a silly notion and a straw man to boot: nobody believes that coverage is entirely objective or wholly impartial. That does not, however, mean that we shouldn’t bother to try to be. The logical corollary is that it is not worth finding out anything about the enemy or the country in which we fight, and that it is acceptable to keep the public in a state of ignorance about the wars which they fight.
The second, more ludicrous, idea, is that war correspondents shun armed guards because of this romantic notion of impartiality. This is just wrong. Journalists don’t ditch armed guards to look “well ‘ard”, but because they hamper their ability to do their job. Hiring local muscle ends up tying you to a faction in the conflict and scaring off sources, while bringing in outside guards (such as from Blackwater/Xe) would only serve to bolster the paranoia of western journalists being spies. Either way, the news won’t be obtained.
What Stephanie Gutmann is therefore proposing is that, “of course” journalists should take risks, but they should take unrealistic steps to ensure self-preservation in a way that will prevent them doing their job. Furthermore, that murdered journalists like Daniel Pearl are somehow “asking for it” and don’t deserve any protection.
What utter twaddle.
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