KILLING THE MESSENGER: Journalists at Risk in Modern Warfare
Reviewed by Steve Weinberg Posted Mon, Feb 26 2007
KILLING THE MESSENGER: Journalists at Risk in Modern Warfare
By Herbert N. Foerstel
Praeger, 161 pages
To state that journalists who enter war zones put their lives in danger is a truism. So, reading a book about the phenomenon might seem senseless on the surface, not to mention depressing.
Below the surface, however, author Herbert N. Foerstel makes a seemingly cliché topic interesting and even useful. After all, well-prepared war correspondents write more informed stories than their counterparts and frequently live longer than the parachuters who depend on divine grace to get their story and leave the zone alive.
Foerstel is a librarian, not a journalist. But he has developed a respect for the vital role of journalists in a society and is hoping to serve as a watchdog for their welfare. His research about war correspondents leads to insights that those in constant danger may fail to grasp about their own place in that danger.
“In today's modern urban warfare there are no front lines, and journalists are no longer collateral casualties,” Foerstel says. “They have become primary targets. The modern war correspondent is in the cross hairs.”
Some war correspondents are not deterred by ratcheted-up dangers to their safety because such reporting is part of their psychological makeup.
Magazine editor Bill Buford calls war journalism “voyeuristic travel writing.” The correspondents want to view fights close-up because the consequences of who prevails matter. Yet another ethic seems to be at work, Buford surmises: the innate attraction of war correspondents to violence.
Foerstel respects history, so he devotes the first chapter to what seems like old-fashioned dangers of reporting conflicts, from the American Civil War to the first Gulf War. In those wars, the locus of battle seemed obvious. Military forces moved to the front and journalists followed, where they would likely face the same dangers.
The second chapter provides an overview of contemporary warfare, emphasizing the lack of a front line and uniformed soldiers, which makes distinguishing between combatants and civilians nearly impossible. Identifying potential sources, who are both truthful and do not intend to harm the questioning journalist is so difficult that some reporters hang back at the Westernized hotel, “covering” the war through osmosis and gossip.
The third chapter is grounded in anecdote, telling the story of four war correspondents, Terry Anderson, Philip Caputo, Jerry Levin and Scott Taylor, who suffered awful physical harm.It includes plenty of warning signs. Foerstel also tells the story of Daniel Pearl,the Wall Street Journal reporter killed by terrorists in Pakistan.
Chapter four explores journalists targeted by warriors, suspicious of newspeople working undercover for the Central Intelligence Agency. The only thing that war correspondents can do to counter suspicion, which stem from paranoia but is not always irrational, is to refrain from taking sides in the name of post-September 11 patriotism.
The final chapter suggests ways to minimize dangers to journalists in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. The suggestions will probably fail to save lives or limit injuries to war correspondents, who will travel anywhere for another story. But, Foerstel provides an important service to journalists by thinking systematically about the dangers, then sharing his knowledge.
Steve Weinberg
Steve Weinberg reviews books regularly for Global Journalist, concentrating on journalistic technique rather than summaries of content.