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70 Nieman Reports / Winter 2003former CBS news correspondent Edward R. Murrow, ruminating on what happened to thereportorial courage he personified in his coverage of Senator Joe McCarthy’s hearings duringthe early 1950’s. “Some things don’t change,” Schechter notes in his letter. “Media institutionsremain citadels of conformity, conservatism and compromise. Courage is in short supply in ourunbrave world of news because it is rarely encouraged or rewarded, especially if and when youdeviate from the script.”Pulitizer Prize-winning photographer David Turnley spent time before and during the IraqWar working in the Gulf region for CNN as a correspondent, contributing to that network’scoverage a mix of video, photography and on-air reporting. He worked in Syria, Turkey and thenin Iraq, transmitting his work daily to CNN in Atlanta. In a book, “Baghdad Blues: A War Diary,”Turnley weaves words and images together “to convey the immensely human story of life duringthe war in Iraq.” Photographs and an excerpt from his book appear on our pages.For 25 years, Margie Reedy has been a television anchor and reporter, most recently as thehost of New England Cable News’s “NewsNight,” a news interview program. Early this year, asthe Iraq War began, Reedy was a fellow at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, working on adocumentary film about cable news. How major cable news organizations covered the warbecame her focus. Reedy’s documentary tracks the approaches various cable networks took totheir coverage and includes interviews with media observers about what implications theremight be because of coverage decisions made during the war. Reedy notes that “there areprofound implications for American television news if opinion—unidentified as such andmasquerading as news—becomes the new paradigm for cable news or even the broadcastnetworks.”In “War Stories: Reporting in the Time of Conflict From Crimea to Iraq,” Harold Evans,former editor of The Sunday Times in London and former editorial director of the New YorkDaily News, U.S. News & World Report, and The Atlantic Monthly, explores the dangers andresponsibilities that war correspondents assume and shows what about the job has changed andwhat has stayed the same through time. He also addresses some difficult questions aboutjournalism and war: “Should a correspondent or the editor ever put truth second to his owncountry’s perceived national interests? What does history have to tell us about the consequencesof evading the censor? … What public benefit is there—if any—in the firsthand picture ofconflict, or does it amount to no more than voyeurism?”This fall the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) published an updated version of itsguidebook to reporting on war and in other situations in which journalists’ lives might bethreatened. Entitled “On Assignment: A Guide to Reporting in Dangerous Situations,” theinformation delves into a range of possible situations in which journalists find they need toreport. Advice includes the warning that “journalists covering conflicts should never carry armsor travel with other journalists who carry weapons,” since doing so “jeopardizes a journalist’sstatus as a neutral observer and can make combatants view correspondents as legitimate militarytargets.” But as the CPJ guide points out, this advice comes at a time when some journalists arehiring armed guards to accompany them into dangerous territories. ■