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Coverage of Terrorism
nalistic community would rally around
her. After all, Ridley would say later,
she was trying to “put a human face on
the demonized Afghans.”
Ridley, disguised as an Afghan
woman, had nearly pulled off her journalistic
coup. She had succeeded in
making the journey from Pakistan
across the border and was by her reckoning
a 20-minute donkey ride away
from returning with her scoop when
her donkey bolted and startled her.
Ridley momentarily lost control,
shouted in English, and was promptly
spotted by the Taliban police.
For her struggling newspaper with
plunging circulation, the Ridley escapade
did grab headlines and put her on
the BBC newscasts. But it also tied up
British diplomats who, allied with the
United States, were about to begin
bombing Afghanistan. It was a distraction
that Blair’s Labor government did
not appreciate.
Remarkably enough, Ridley did survive
and was eventually released unharmed
by the Taliban. But instead of
accolades, Ridley received brickbats
from other British editors who had
refused to allow their correspondents
to do a “John Simpson”—the veteran
BBC war correspondent who, along
with his cameraman, had donned
burkas and snuck into Afghanistan for
their exclusive reports.
At the BBC, probably the world’s
most safety conscious news organization,
the Simpson assignment had been
The Ridley experience points out the
high risks that irresponsible news
organizations are prepared to take
to get an exclusive story….
discussed and debated before he’d been
given a green light. Although one senior
BBC news executive later told me
he did have grave reservations about
the assignment, he did in the end acquiesce,
as Simpson, who had covered
countless wars and had come under
attack in Baghdad during the Gulf War,
was adamant that he could pull it off.
Simpson also had decades of experience
reporting on Afghanistan and
knows the country and its people exceptionally
well.
Ridley, on the other hand, was
rushed off to Pakistan without any of
the standard equipment that newspapers
and broadcasters were equipping
their correspondents with—no laptop,
no satellite phone, and none of the
protective gear that she would need if
she ventured out of Islamabad. Nor
could she have had time to get the
needed anti-hepatitis shots and water
purification pills and kit that would
protect her against malaria and other
potentially life-threatening diseases.
When her editors encouraged her undercover
assignment across the border,
they advised her to leave behind
her passport and any other identification.
Other editors were particularly
appalled by that absence of judgment.
The Ridley experience points out
the high risks that irresponsible news
organizations are prepared to take to
get an exclusive story, especially in
Britain, one of the most cutthroat and
competitive news markets in the world.
But it also points out that many editors
and news executives are now unwilling
to have their reporters—especially
those camped out with the Northern
Alliance—push themselves beyond
what is already a gruelling battle daily
to survive the elements. The Daily
Telegraph’s foreign editor, Alec Russell,
was scathing in his criticism of the
Sunday Express.
In a
damning
piece about
the Ridley
“folly” in The
Guardian
newspaper,
Russell was
quoted describing
it as “unbelievably foolish…a
crazy thing to do.”
While Ridley escaped the Taliban
and wrote about her experience, her
local “fixers” will be lucky to escape
with their lives. In a radio interview,
Ridley was asked about whether she
felt guilty about their arrest. She said
that she was concerned but that they,
like the others swarming around journalists
in Islamabad, knew that in order
to get paid hundreds of American
dollars they could be risking their lives.
That explanation is not good enough
for British safety trainer Andrew Kain.
Kain is the founding director of AKE,
one of the leading firms that conduct
“hostile environment” training courses
for journalists in Britain, the United
States, and on the ground in Northern
Afghanistan. Kain argues that international
journalists must be “accountable”;
that they have a special responsibility
toward the local journalists or
fixers upon whom they depend in conflict
zones. Kain dismisses Ridley’s explanation
that these fixers know what
they are getting into when they accept
these assignments. “They live in abject
poverty so of course they are willing to
take these risks,” Kain observes. He
thinks that it is shameful that Ridley’s
newspaper hasn’t “lobbied at the highest
levels” to secure the release of the
fixers who could now be dead.
The Ridley caper will make a perfect
case study in Kain’s courses and those
taught by the other leading safety training
firms including the U.K.-based Centurion
whose director, Paul Rees, an
ex-Royal Marine, estimates has trained
over 7,500 journalists since it introduced
its courses outside of London in
1995. When Rees and Kain began their
courses, the idea that journalists should
be taught how to behave in war zones
was anathema to many of them who
accepted the conventional wisdom that
the only way to become an experienced
war correspondent was to be
thrown into a conflict zone and learn
the hard way. [More information on
these training programs can be found
at www.akegroup.com/services and
www.centurion-riskservices.co.uk.]
This is a view still held by the foreign
editor of National Public Radio, Loren
Jenkins, who was a superb foreign correspondent
who received a Pulitzer
Prize for reporting in the Middle East.
Jenkins and NPR don’t require their
budding correspondents to go through
these safety training and first-aid
courses. In an e-mailed response to a
request for a statement I could use to
explain his attitude, Jenkins said: “Do I
26 Nieman Reports / Winter 2001