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BACK TO : WAR & CRISIS REPORTING
To Die For: Why Journalists Risk All by A Hassan 
To Die For WHY JOURNALISTS RISK ALL BY ADEEL HASSAN Chris Hedges was sprinting down a road in the Gaza Strip, just ahead of some young Palestinians carrying Molotov cocktails whom he had been interviewing, dodging bullets fired by Israeli soldiers, when he concluded that he could no longer be a war correspondent. It was at this moment, in the fall of 2000, after twenty years of being shot at, shelled, bombed, ambushed, and taken prisoner, that Hedges, a reporter for The New York Times, made "a very conscious decision to stop." Others, like Ian Stewart, an AP reporter who was shot in the head in 1999 in Sierra Leone, stopped when they were wounded. The sixteen journalists featured on the next two pages didn't get to make that decision. They lost their lives in Iraq. Which raises the question: If physical and emotional injuries and death can end such careers, then what starts them? Why do some journalists risk all? Perhaps the main motive is simple: "I've been a storyteller my whole life and war is a big story," says John Laurence, who covered the Iraq conflict primarily for Esquire and has covered sixteen wars, beginning with Vietnam. But there are other reasons, including the need to make a mark. Laurence saw that in the two other reporters he traveled with in Iraq. One was on her first big story for a Latin-American newspaper. The other was a photographer "who came to try and prove himself." Stewart, for one, did not set out to become a war correspondent when he graduated from journalism school in 1991. He reported from more than forty countries and covered the wars in West Africa in the late 1990s because "it was the hottest story then." Shortly after the coup in Sierra Leone, he and Myles Tierney, an AP Television News producer, were ambushed by rebels in their car. Tierney died instantly; Stewart was given a 20 percent chance of living. Today, his left arm is paralyzed. Stewart says that many war reporters, including himself, are in denial about the danger. "It happens," he says, "but it was never going to happen to you." Stewart's uncle, Brian Stewart, one of Canada's most accomplished foreign correspondents, helped instill in him the belief that journalists are at the front line of history. Michael Kelly, the late editor of The Atlantic Monthly and columnist for The Washington Post, also was drawn to war, at least in part, as a matter of conviction. "He was an advocate of this war," says John Fox Sullivan, publisher of the Atlantic. "So he really felt a responsibility to cover it." Kelly was killed when the Humvee in which he was riding came under enemy fire and swerved into a canal. Lieutenant Colonel Rock Marcone told the National Journal: "Mike begged me to get him up front for the assault on the airfield, and I finally agreed. That was what Michael wanted to do. He was going to get his story." Kelly must have understood something of what Hedges gets at in his new book, War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, when he explains that reporters get addicted to the emotional intensity. "There's a close-knit fraternity of war correspondents," Hedges says. "Courage is very highly looked upon. You earn your way into it." Not all war reporters are looking to be part of this mostly male fraternity. Judith Matloff describes herself as "accidental conflict reporter." In the early 1980s, Matloff was doing research in Mexico and began writing free-lance pieces. She joined Reuters, and eventually covered forty-seven countries, half of which were in conflict, as Africa bureau chief for The Christian Science Monitor. "People who are in this for the thrill, that's the wrong motivation," she says. "War is a huge part of the human experience." To cover it, she says, "You have to have a big heart, moral vision, and never lose sight of your humanity." But is it worth it, after all? "After 9/11, everyone in the newsroom was fighting to go to Afghanistan," says Maria Ramirez, twenty-five, a contributor to El Mundo, Spain's second largest daily. But then one El Mundo reporter was killed in Afghanistan, another in Israel, and later a third in Iraq, and suddenly there were no more volunteers. "There is no story worth a life," she says. Yet the world does need to see and understand its armed conflicts. After covering World War II, the CBS correspondent Eric Sevareid told his radio listeners, "The war must be seen to be believed, but it must be lived to be understood." John Laurence agrees. "If no one was risking their lives for this war, then the public wouldn't be informed," he says. "If we're not willing to do that, then the idea of a free press has quite a defect, and democracy would really cease to exist. There have to be some risks worth dying for. Being a good reporter is one of them." |