Covering the war every editor fears
By Richard Tait Posted Apr 1 2002
The war in Afghanistan is the conflict every editor has feared – in many ways it symbolized how very dangerous our profession has become in the last few years. It is a war, in the main, without front lines; a war where reporters are at risk from unpredictable and ill-disciplined troops on the ground and destructive attacks from the air; and a war that tested to the limit the new technologies of reporting and the new priority many of the leading news organizations now give to safety.
Unlike the Gulf War, this is not a war for accredited correspondents working with and under the protection of well-organized allied forces. Reporters and television crews have to make their own ar-rangements with individual Northern Al-liance commanders or, in some cases, with the Taliban, to be given access to the conflict. In Afghanistan there is none of the public relations paraphernalia of modern warfare – no briefing centers, no press conferences, no playing of cockpit videos. It is front-line reporting at its purest.
It is also extremely dangerous. For the first couple months of the conflict, the death toll among journalists covering the Afghan war was higher than among the allied forces fighting it. The journalists and camera operators who died were fine professionals and experienced operators. Johanne Sutton, Pierre Billaud and Volker Handloik were killed in a Taliban ambush near the Tajik border on Nov. 12. Maria Grazia Cutuli, Harry Burton, Azizullah Haidari, Julio Fuentes were killed in an ambush by bandits on Nov. 19 on the road from Jalalabad to Kabul. In both ambushes, the roads on which they were killed had been declared safe for travel. Other journalists had either decided not to join their convoys or had traveled on the same roads in safety previously. On Nov. 27, Ulf Stromberg was murdered in a house in which he was staying.
These tragic deaths were all too reminiscent of the murders in May 2000 of two outstanding war correspondents – Miguel Gil Moreno de Mora of APTN and Kurt Schork of Reuters – on a road thought safe in Sierra Leone. Those deaths provoked a major rethinking about safety among the main news agencies and Western broadcast news organizations. The BBC, ITN, CNN, Reuters and APTN formed a news safety group dedicated to promoting high safety standards of training and equipment and agree to pool safety information in areas of high risk. We have now been joined by a host of other news organizations such as the U.S. networks and the major European broadcasters. We have all invested heavily in hostile environment training. For example, over the last eight years, ITN has trained more than 170 people, staff and freelance alike, in safety and survival techniques. We are all committed to making the safety of our staff our first priority.
A good example of that commitment in practice came after the murders of the four western journalists on Nov. 19. The members of the news safety group agreed the situation was now too dangerous for other reporters to travel as planned on the Quetta to Kandahar road under Taliban escort. We all held our teams at the Taliban-controlled village of Spin Buldek, and after a couple of days there, brought them back into Pakistan. Despite the intense pressures of journalistic competition, no one questioned our decision that safety had to come first.
The war was also a first major test for the new digital technology that is revolutionizing print and broadcast journalism. The satellite phone enabled journalists to file from the most inaccessible parts of the country.
Broadcasters added to satellite phone technology the videophone, enabling reporters to be seen on location live and to “store and forward” using digital technology. This enabled them to send reasonable quality pictures of the war direct to their news centers without the need to go to a TV station or access a satellite dish. In any case, the conditions in Afghanistan meant it would have been unacceptably dangerous to try bringing mobile satellite dishes up to the battle zone. Front-line reporters could file live updates on the latest news of the war as it was happening — pinpointing, for example, the change in U.S. bombing tactics, which led to the collapse of Taliban resistance in front of Kabul.
The result was reporting of great immediacy and power, but at a price of increasing the potential risk to journalists and camera crews. In one case, ITN reporter, Andrea Catherwood found herself the only Western journalist in Mazar-e-Sharif when the town fell to the Northern Alliance. She was taken to see Taliban prisoners at the Qala-i-Janghi jail and was wounded by shrapnel when a Taliban prisoner exploded a hand grenade, killing himself and attempting to kill his Northern Alliance captors and our film crew. Despite the remoteness of the location, she was able to file a story that foretold the Taliban prisoner insurrection that was about to erupt by using videophone technology.
We managed with some difficulty to evacuate Catherwood, and she has now made a full recovery. The technology that has liberated reporters has created huge logistical problems. In a country without infrastructure, keeping teams supplied with food, medicine and clean water was as much a challenge as anything else. ITN, the BBC and the main U.S. news organizations spent huge sums on setting up logistical supply chains, for example from Dusanbe in Tajikistan into the Panshir Valley, and on to Kabul. We provided all our staff with safety equipment and clothing. We worked hard to relieve reporters and crews in the field on a regular basis to avoid excessive tiredness and strain. We had specialist advice on medical precautions and health hazards.
All this costs a great deal of money. Much of the technology that is revolutionizing war reporting is comparatively inexpensive; a videophone, for example, costs between $15,000 and $20,000. But the costs of safety and logistical support were considerable. ITN had up to 15 reporters and 25 crews and producers in and around Afghanistan during the conflict. The costs were greater than we could afford within our existing coverage budgets, and we approached the commercial broadcasters in the U.K. (ITV, Channel Four and Channel Five) who carry ITN news services for extra funds. They increased our budgets by a total of $200,000 a week for the bulk of the war. Other broadcasters and newspapers, too, had to find substantial additional funds.
An added cost in the case of Afghanistan was local assistance, both logistical and, in some cases, military protection, from local commanders in the field. This became quite a controversial issue among the news organizations in Afghanistan, because for some local commanders the western media became an important source of hard currency. In some cases, there was competition between groups to “take care” of Western news teams. The issue became most difficult for those news organizations that chose to pay for military protection and bodyguards. In at least one case, a quarrel between rival groups over who would have the protection contract to guard an American news team ended in violence and the journalists having to get out of town rather quickly.
If the Afghan war is, as George W. Bush has promised, the start of an extended “war on terrorism” rather than the end of it, the challenge for the world’s news organizations is clear. We and others are already reviewing the right balance between domestic and international coverage. The European media had not in general gone so far down the road of closing international bureau and focusing on domestic news as had the U.S. media in the last decade. However, all media organizations are under financial strain as competitive pressures increase.
We have to ensure that in an increasingly dangerous and unpredictable world we retain the resources necessary to cover the international agenda. That means having well trained and equipped staff with the relevant experience to work safely in a world that is increasingly hostile to reporters and crews. It means using the new technology to report firsthand without an unacceptable increase in risk. It means giving sufficient column inches, air time and prominence to a wider range of international stories to ensure that journalism continues to play its vital role in society of informing its readers and viewers of the issues that really matter in the world.