This video, and the ensuing article, raise several questions for me.
When I was in journalism school I heard a talk by Anne Garrels, who covered the Iraq War for NPR. At the time, Garrels struck me as a fantastic creature, almost one out of myth. How could someone be so fearless, I wondered.
But I later learned that not all war correspondents are fearless. Journalists are under tremendous daily pressure to produce. (As a daily news reporter, I can attest that no matter how many stories I write, my editors are always eager for more) In India, the result of this pressure is the "routine." On news-heavy, important beats like home ministry, finance ministry, terrorism, etc, all the beat reporters get together at least once a day to discuss the "routine" stories that they're all going to file. This production by committee ensures that no one misses a big press conference.
The result, of course, is that reporters often rely too much on 'routine' instead of seeking out new stories (and again, someone who hasn't faced daily deadline pressure, particularly intense in a political beat, would have trouble understanding this). In war, the same thing must happen, but multiplied by ten. The result is that there is often a lot of bad war journalism (and when I say 'bad' I also mean 'easy.') As a daily correspondent, one of the greatest challenges of the job is balancing the stories you must write with the stories you want to write.
Which brings me to the WikiLeaks video. The NY Times article says, "Reuters said at the time that the two men had been working on a report about weightlifting when they heard about a military raid in the neighborhood, and decided to drive there to check it out." In her talk, Garrels talked about the "zoo story." The zoo story was the easy story that every reporter filed at least once. (In India also, the 'zoo story' is the easy story) Journalists are rarely killed while covering zoo stories - those stories are safe. It's when they pursue the stories they want to do that they must walk into danger.
Which brings me to the second point...the military response.
The article also contains this telling paragraph.
"The United States Central Command, which oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, released the redacted report on the case. The report showed pictures of what it said were machine guns and grenades found near the bodies of those killed. It also stated that the Reuters employees "made no effort to visibly display their status as press or media representatives and their familiar behavior with, and close proximity to, the armed insurgents and their furtive attempts to photograph the coalition ground forces made them appear as hostile combatants to the Apaches that engaged them.""
The military response turns the situation into a game of "he said, she said." Were the journalists being brave? Or were they being nosy troublemakers? Is it merely a difference of perspective? This, of course, is the fundamental tug-of-war between the armed forces and the media in any conflict zone (or any authority and the media in any zone). It is a relationship of mutual need but mutual distrust.
The New York Times article contains one final, telling point.
The Indian police are notorious for "encounter killings." Encounters are shootouts between police and criminals. As in many countries, Indian police are only permitted to shoot criminals if the criminals open fire first.
Because legal cases can take years to resolve, and because many criminals work for influential mob bosses who can buy them out of jail or bribe the judge, the Indian police have developed the "encounter." They take a dangerous criminal (someone they've arrested multiple times but, thanks to patronage, has escaped sentencing), release him in a deserted area, and shoot him. Then they plant guns on the body and claim that they "encountered" armed resistance and were forced to open fire.
Human rights groups uniformly condemn encounter killings, but young cops can make their reputation off them. Some truly dangerous criminals have been polished off this way, but so have many innocent men (consider the extent of corruption in the police force, of which the Ruchika Girhotra case is perhaps the most infamous recent example, and it's not hard to believe that Indian police would abuse this power) Abuse has led to the "fake encounter," in which guns are planted on someone who wasn't a criminal, as a cover-up of police misdeeds.
The NY Times article contains two accounts of what took place that day in Baghdad. People at the scene claim there was no hostile action by the journalists. The military, on the other hand, claims to have discovered grenades on the bodies of the fallen.
Did the US armed forces stage a "fake encounter"? It is an accusation the article's author is aware of, although he doesn't make it.
This entire example illustrates how difficult it is to report out of a warzone. Confused, pressured, endangered, reporters too often must take the military's word for what happens. And on that rare occasion that they try to follow the truth, they fall into the gray zone of the encounter. Did the military deliberately kill the two Reuters journalists? Almost certainly not. But because the journalists were doing something that they shouldn't have been, it was all too easy for the military to dismiss their deaths as "collateral damage."
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