Risks Journalists Take

 

1,800 pictures and glass plaques with the names of journalists line the wall at the Newseum in Washington D.C., covering an entire wall from top to bottom. After reading the caption accompanying the display it explains that these are the pictures of the journalists who died covering the news from 1837 to 2007. The Newseum recently added 158 names to this memorial in honor of those journalists who had been killed between 2006 and 2007.

If it weren’t for the journalists who go to the countries like Darfur, Afghanistan, or Iraq during times of conflict, the common citizen would be uninformed and possibly unconcerned by the disasters unfolding hundreds of miles away.

Over the past week at Georgetown University during a journalism seminar for their School of Continuing Studies high school program, guest speakers ranging from pollsters, former Ambassadors to Sudan, and reporters have been talking to teens about the ongoing conflict in Sudan and ways of gathering information to sufficiently cover it and similar events.

“My job is to write articles about people who are trying to help,” Emily Holland, the in-house producer for the International Rescue Committee, said, “to translate the humanitarian world to your schools and your living rooms, to learn a little bit more about it, and to care enough when you’re older to donate.”

In times of the changing media, reporters, journalists and humanitarians are all now looking for different ways to present their information that can generate interest in the public.

“People used to say, why do care about Africa? Nobody’s going to pay attention. But by using our new interactive media and multiple angles to cover our story like online reports and broadcasts,” Nathalie Applewhite, associate director of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, said, “people did end up caring.”

But in the chase for a good story, journalists take the risks of getting caught up in the conflict surrounding them.

“The first time I ever saw a foreign correspondent covering Vietnam, I thought that’s pretty glamorous, I want to do that,” Susan Milligan, correspondent for the Boston Globe, said. “Basically it didn’t occur to me that he could die. Because he was on TV, it gave me the illusion that he was safe, and I think we still think that way today.”

But after having been in places such as Kosovo and Albania, Milligan can pledge that there is nothing “glamorous” about having a “gun held to the base of your skull.”

“Before getting into this job, you have to know and understand that the risks today are maybe even greater than when I started out as a reporter.” Milligan said. “Back then, the reporters traveled with the army and were protected to a degree, but now it seems as if we’re on the front lines.”

Now when journalists head out to the danger zones looking for a story, there are cardinal rules they all know to follow.

“You never go anywhere alone,” Milligan said. “And although you may  think when you’re with other reporters, that  you’re safe because there’s a lot of other westerners around and that they won’t do anything to you, but you’re wrong. I remember just standing on top of my hotel’s rooftop watching the bombs drop and all of a sudden these men with guns told me to come with them.”

After her and a number of other reporters were arrested, Milligan’s sister received a phone call from her foreign editors telling her sister that she had been taken into custody and that they had no idea how they were going to get her out.

“That was a pretty tense night. We were in a war zone, there were no rules,” Milligan said. “We didn’t know if they would kill us or what they were going to do to us.”

Eventually the authorities let her and the other reporters leave, also kicking them out of the country.

“I remember there being a point during another one of my assignments that the other, older reporters sat me down and told me straight off, that I was being too cavalier,” Milligan said. “They said, just because they weren’t shooting at me that didn’t mean I couldn’t be hit.”

In places like Albania and Kosovo Milligan claims she wasn’t a target, but that that all changes in zones like Iraq and Afghanistan, where as an American you become a target.

“I remember feeling relatively safe in Pakistan when Daniel Pearl had been kidnapped,” Milligan said. “And then I got the email showing the video telling all journalists to leave the country or that we’d be killed to.”

Milligan states that when you start to “feel that you’re safe and get too comfortable,” that’s when you’re the most at risk to getting hurt.

“Never go anywhere alone.” Milligan said. “When somebody insists that you go alone to get you’re story, realize it’s not worth it – you may not get out of there alive.”

Now that more and more journalists are heading into these unstable countries, many are receiving training to help prepare them for when they do run across a volatile situation.

“I remember going to a conference with the MI-5, where they taught me all these tricks to protecting myself,” Milligan said. “The one thing they said that was most important was that if you ever start feeling uncomfortable, get out. Just because you can’t see it or hear it, doesn’t mean it’s not there. It could mean the difference between life and death.”