Which Messengers get Shot?
Afghan journalist Sultan Munadi was shot dead by an unknown source during a British rescue operation that saved British journalist Stephen Farrell.
British journalist Robert Fisk resists romanticized descriptions of his profession. He quotes Israeli journalist Amira Hass when he notes that a journalist’s job is to “monitor power and the centres of power.” Fisk has risked his life many times while reporting in war zones but admits that the “trauma” that war reporters experience is nothing compared to the victims of war:
If the soldiers I watched decided to leave the battlefield, they would — many of them — be shot for desertion, or at least court-martialed. The civilians among whom I was to live and work were forced to stay on under bombardments, their families decimated by shellfire and air raids. As citizens of pariah nations, there would be no visas for them. But if I wanted to quit, if I grew sick of the horrors I saw, I could pack my bag and fly home. . .Which is why I cringe each time someone wants to psycho-babble about the trauma of covering wars. The need to obtain counseling for us well-paid scribes that we may be able to ‘come to terms’ with what we’ve seen. No counselling for the poor and huddled masses that were left to Iraq’s gas, Iran’s rockets, the cruelty of Serbia’s militias, the brutal Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the computerised death suffered by Iraqis during America’s 2003 invasion of their country.
The difference between journalists like Fisk and CNN’s Anderson Cooper are many, but exist most obviously in what they do and how much they get paid to do it. While Cooper loves to wear a bulletproof vest when reporting in war zones (during Israel’s war on Gaza in December 2009 Cooper proudly displayed one while broadcasting from his well-protected station in Israel — he never set foot in Gaza and never demanded to be allowed to), Fisk has often been in active battle zones with nothing but his pen and scrap paper. Fisk has referred to himself and his colleagues as “well paid scribes,” but there are deep divisions in this definition as well. For example, it has been reported that Cooper receives 4 million dollars a year from his contract with CNN. Does Cooper really monitor the centres of power, or has he become a part of them?
In the beginning of September 2009 Afghan journalist Sultan Munadi was killed during a British military “rescue operation” to save him and British journalist Stephen Farrell of The New York Times from their Taliban abductors. Farrell survived unharmed, while Munadi, who had escaped along with Farrell during the confusion that followed the raid, was shot multiple times from a still to be established source. It is entirely possible that he was killed by the same soldiers who were sent to rescue him. A British soldier and several Afghan civilians were also killed. Witnesses state that Munadi yelled “journalist, journalist” with his arms raised before the shots were fired.
Fisk continues:
I think ‘war correspondent’ smells a bit, reeks of false romanticism; it has too much the whiff of Victorian reporters who would view battles from hilltops in the company of ladies, immune to suffering… Yet war is paradoxically a very powerful, unique experience for a journalist—an opportunity to indulge in the only vicarious excitement still free of charge. If you’ve seen the movies, why not experience the real thing? I fear some of my colleagues have died this way, by heading to war on the assumption that it is still Hollywood, that the heroes don’t die, that you can’t get killed like the others, that they’ll all be Huntley Haverstocks with a scoop and the best girl. But you can get killed. In just one year in Bosnia, thirty of my colleagues died.
How many reporters from mainstream outlets like Fox News or CNN have suffered similar fates?
Al Jazeera’s Emmy-nominated Shooting the Messenger aired this past Friday. It focuses on the deliberate killing and intimidation of journalists in conflict zones. You can watch it below.
