Live News - A Survival Guide - International Federation of Journalists

Live News — A Survival Guide for Journalistsreporters started wearing uniforms and carrying weapons — and shooting those weapons atAmerica's enemies — even though their country was not officially as war and even when theycould have carried out their duties without wearing soldiers' clothes. In Vietnam, reporters weremurdered because they were reporters.This odd habit of journalists to be part of the story, to play an almost theatrical role in warsslowly took hold. When the Palestinians evacuated Beirut in 1982, I noticed several Frenchreporters wearing Palestinian kaffiyeh scarves. Israeli reporters turned up in occupied southernLebanon with pistols. Then in the 1991 Gulf war, American and British television reportersstarted dressing up in military costumes, appeared on screen — complete with helmets andmilitary camouflage fatigues — as if they were members of the 82nd Airborne or the Hussars.One American journalist even arrived in boots camouflaged with painted leaves, although aglance at any desert suggests this would not have served much purpose.In the Kurdish flight into the mountains of northern Iraq, more reporters could be found wearingKurdish clothes. In Pakistan and Afghanistan last year, the same phenomenon occurred.Reporters in Peshawar could be seen wearing Pashtun hats. Why? No one could ever supplyme with an explanation. What on earth was CNN's Walter Rodgers doing in US Marinecostume at the American camp outside Kandahar? Mercifully, someone told him to take it offafter his first broadcast. Then Geraldo Rivera of Fox News arrived in Jalalabad with a gun. Hefully intended, he said, to kill Osama bin Laden. It was the last straw. The reporter had nowbecome combatant.Perhaps we no longer care about our profession. Maybe we're all too quick to demean our ownjobs, to sneer at each other, to adopt the ridiculous title of 'hacks' when we should regard thejob of foreign correspondent as a decent, honourable profession. I was astounded lastDecember when an American newspaper headline announced that I had deserved the beatingI received at the hands of that Afghan crowd. I had almost died, but the article carried aheadline, 'Multiculturalist (me) Gets His Due'. My sin was to explain that the crowd had lostrelatives in American B-52 raids, that I would have done the same in their place. That shameful,unethical headline appeared in Daniel Pearl's own newspaper, the Wall Street Journal.Can we do better? I think so. It's not that reporters in military costume — Rodgers in his sillyMarine helmet, Rivera clowning around with a gun, or even me in my gas cape a decade agohelped to kill Daniel Pearl. He was murdered by vicious men. But we are all of us — dressingup in combatant's clothes or adopting the national dress of people — helping to erode theshield of neutrality and decency that saved our lives in the past. If we don't stop now, how canwe protest when next our colleagues are seized by ruthless men who claim we are spies? ■This article first appeared in the Independent on February 23 2002© Independent61