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.”
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Adeel
Hassan is an assistant editor at
CJR. 
