When the Reporter Becomes the Story

Reporters have been covering wars since the American Civil War, and they have been killed doing it since the beginning. What is new is that they are now targets, not incidental casualties who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. This change in status requires a serious rethinking of how a journalist should cover a war.

Embedding them in specific units removes the likelihood of capture, but also puts them on a very short leash and permits the brass to manage what they see and what they report.

The way things were handled at Grenada is even worse. From a reporter’s point of view, Grenada was a Potemkin War. By the time the reporters were allowed in, all the messy and inconvenient parts were out of site. Potemkin Villages were fake towns built to fool Catherine the Great into thinking her latest conquest was worth the effort. Grenada was a Potemkin War because its purpose was to get America's mind off the disaster in Lebanon two days before when more than 200 Marines were blown up in their barracks because they didn't have the slightest idea what they were doing there.

It seems to me that the real question is: what do you do when the reporter becomes the story? How should the abduction of a reporter be handled? Clearly, the whole purpose is to attempt to use public opinion in the furtherance of goals not obtainable otherwise. The press really has only two choices, cover reporter abductions, or not cover them. I find myself tending toward not covering.

The fact that the captors are naïve and have greatly inflated ideas of the power of the press in affecting policy complicates the matter. As long as they believe there is something to be gained by capturing news people and killing them to show determination, news people will be at risk. Of course, the news people are there because they believe their work influences policy, which exacerbates the problem.

In an ideal world, the capture of reporters would not be reported, thus demonstrating that no purpose would be served by their continued incarceration. But that might lead to the murder of reporters instead. The rationale would be, “push our demands or we will kill your people.” There is no guarantee that failing to report on the beheading of a reporter would make life safer for the other reporters. There is always the possibility that these people would conclude that they haven’t captured or killed enough reporters.

The argument for covering is that it is news. But that is a reckless approach that has been observed more in the breach than in the practice. For instance, people going to the movies during the WWII never saw anything like the opening scene of “Saving Private Ryan” on the newsreel. It was felt that showing dead GIs would hurt the war effort. That is the same reason the networks stopping showing combat footage from Vietnam during the evening news.

In this case, it is not the war effort that I care about. It is our need to understand what is happening and why it is happening that must be served. That can’t happen if the reporter becomes the story.

Tom Gordon

Tsg0008@sbcglogal.net