Journalists sometimes go where no one in their right mind would go. If you’ve been following coverage of the wars in Israel and Ukraine, you know that, and might want to know why. To say it’s part of the job description doesn’t tell the story. They make choices, not only whether to accept the assignment in the first place, but once they’re on the ground, whether they can afford to take the risks it requires.
It begins with this principle: journalists can’t go where they can’t go. In a war zone— in Israel, in Ukraine— that doesn’t mean where they shouldn’t go. It means where they can’t go. Sometimes it’s the people with the guns who stop you from crossing a line. I’ve been stopped by soldiers, by militias, by terrorists, by lone wolves on power trips. There’s nothing like a machine gun to your temple to make you rethink your plans.
And sometimes it’s the risks that stop you, because if bullets are flying or shells are exploding, you can’t just “hope for the best.” You have to calculate the risks. How far can you go without going too far? How long can you stay without staying too long?
And there’s another set of calculations you can never forget to make. How many rules can you break in hostile territory before you break one too many? How impertinent can you be with people stressed by the heat of battle before you push too far?
You also are prudent to calculate whether, as an American journalist in particular, you’re going somewhere when tensions are high and an authoritarian government might arrest you as a pawn. The Wall Street Journal’s Evan Gershkovich learned that lesson in the hardest of ways. His mistake was being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was grabbed more than half a year ago while digging for a story in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg and charged with espionage. He has been behind bars ever since. If he’s convicted, he faces 19 more years of it.
Those are all part of the calculations a foreign correspondent has to make: how far to go, how long to stay, where to travel, who to push, how impertinent to be? But after asking those questions and deciding that the story is worth the risks, you do have to go. That is part of the job description.
It’s part of what you see today if you follow news coverage of either war.
Just a couple of days into the war in Israel, CNN’s chief international correspondent Clarissa Ward and a camera crew were doing a live report at the edge of Gaza when what she described as “a massive barrage of rockets” began to come in. She and the crew ran for a ditch and she continued her report lying on her side, in the ditch.
A friend of mine, a former correspondent himself, thought it was kind of showy, but when you’re in a war and the fire gets hot, a ditch can suddenly become the best place to be.
It’s worth adding, every time you see a television correspondent in a dangerous place, there is a courageous crew behind the lens recording it. While Ward’s cameraman was running for cover behind his correspondent, he never stopped shooting.
Ward and her crew guessed right. They didn’t get hurt But sometimes, journalists guess wrong. Three dreadful stories in my own career make the point, stories which are just as likely to happen today.
During the war in Uganda to drive out the vicious dictator Idi Amin, my camera crew and I collaborated with three European journalists about the best way to get into the country. They favored a boat across Lake Victoria. My crew, more war-weary and wiser than I, calculated the odds and didn’t like the plan. We got into Uganda another way. The Europeans took the boat and reached the Uganda shoreline but within minutes they were caught by soldiers loyal to Amin, put on trial, and executed as spies.
During the revolution in Iran, I was alongside three other correspondents, including Joe Alex Morris of the Los Angeles Times, crouching on a second floor balcony, watching a battle on the street below. We had miscalculated how close we were to the line of fire. I’ve never known whether it was a stray shot or deliberately aimed at us as journalists, but a bullet killed Joe.
During the civil war in Beirut, I was sharing a cameraman with a correspondent for the Canadian network CTV named Clark Todd. We had miscalculated the speed with which Druze and Christian militiamen were closing in on each other. We got caught in the crossfire and Clark caught shrapnel. As he died, he used his finger to write with his own blood, “Tell my family I love them.”
To put it simply, sometimes when you’re covering a war, there is no good place to be. I wish there had been a ditch for Clark. I wish there had been a ditch for Joe.
Journalists are killed in every war. The Committee to Protect Journalists confirms 29 journalists killed so far in the war in Israel, eight more injured, and nine are missing. Most of those are Palestinian journalists, who have had no choice but to go where it can be lethal to go, where no one in their right mind would go, since they have no other place they can be. Since Russia attacked Ukraine in February last year, 32 journalists have died. If you include its invasion of Crimea in 2014, the figure is 37.
No one makes journalists do what they do. We’re just lucky they’ll take those risks. If they didn’t, we’d know far less about dangerous places and dangerous wars we need to understand.
Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
Such a jarring reminder of how much we owe journalists --
Journalists are unsung heroes who are too often vilified these days.