(Dobbs) The Risks The Journalists Face In Ukraine
They can manage them. They can't escape them.
If a bullet can strike a civilian in Ukraine, it can strike a journalist. If a missile, a rocket, a bomb can kill a civilian, it can kill a journalist.
That’s why reporting from Ukraine is a risky business. Reporting from any war is a risky business. So when you read, watch, or listen to journalists’ reports from this war, it might be useful to understand the risks and the challenges they face.
And to understand how they manage them.
I covered eight wars over the years— typically with a two-man camera crew who had to depend on my judgement as I depended on theirs— and albeit a simplification, there were two things we had to calculate every time we found ourselves facing gunfire or hostile mobs: how far to go without going too far, and how long to stay without staying too long.
Of course the deaths of journalists in every war underscore the fact that such calculations aren’t even close to foolproof. If a journalist had been at that maternity hospital in Mariupol that was just hit by an air strike, it would have been a rational calculation gone bad. But short of withdrawing from the field of battle, making an educated guess is the best you can do to stay alive.
Then add another risk, not unimaginable in Ukraine’s current state of martial law: the risk that soldiers— Russian or Ukrainian— try to stop you from doing your job. You can’t just wave a copy of the Constitution in their faces and assert freedom of the press. They’ve got the guns, you don’t. In too many places I’ve been, they’d just as soon stomp on our First Amendment as abide by it. In some, they’re happy to stomp on reporters too.
Another risk is telling the good guys from the bad guys. From what I’ve seen so far in Ukraine, that hasn’t been a challenge for journalists but since it is a nation where many have Russian roots, it’s not implausible that two soldiers in camouflage with similar ethnic features fight on different sides of the war. So knowing who will welcome you and who will threaten you isn’t always easy. In Beirut during Lebanon’s civil war, where two militia were in a lethal fight for control of a neighborhood, they didn’t carry different flags so we’d know who we were dealing with; everyone looked alike. In Tehran during the revolution, uniformed soldiers switched sides in the midst of the fighting, and we had no way of knowing who was who. In Belfast during The Troubles, Catholic terrorists and Protestant terrorists were all citizens of the same nation, and indistinguishable.
A cardinal challenge in journalism is not to be cheerleaders for one side, even when the difference between good and bad in the war in Ukraine is so obvious. Journalists on the ground there can be empathetic about the suffering and loss all around them. It’s only human. But their job is to report on what they see, not on how they feel. It’s challenging, but in the interest of solid journalism, necessary. Here at home, from what they tell us and show us, we can figure out which side we support.
They also can’t lose sight of the fact that every side puts out propaganda. An example is the casualty count of Russian soldiers. Ukraine claims more than 10,000 have been killed. Russia says it’s only in the hundreds. The U.S. Department of Defense gives a range between two- and four-thousand. Some claims might seem more credible than others— Ukraine has good cause to inflate the numbers while Russia has reason to minimize them— but unless a journalist can count every corpse, each claim has to be reported with attribution, if not also a dose of skepticism.
Then, even in the best of circumstances, there’s the unremitting challenge to get your story right, and anyone reporting from Ukraine is not blessed with the best of circumstances. Social media in this 21st Century can be a bountiful source of information, which can give journalists in the middle of a war plenty of help. But it also can be a dangerous source of misinformation, which makes the journalists’ job harder.
Still though, it’s an improvement on the pre-cellphone 20th Century. I saw a case in point on the PBS NewsHour Tuesday night. After reporting on the war from inside Ukraine, a correspondent transitioned to reporting something that President Biden had said about the war in Washington. Not long ago, that couldn’t have happened. We could be cut off from the outside world for days on end. We had to report only on what we could see with our own two eyes. No help from social media, no help from headquarters.
The best thing today’s journalists have going for them in a difficult environment like Ukraine is actually getting their stories out to the world. They have 21st Century technology as a tool for speed, and whether it’s the transmission of words and photos or a television broadcast in real time, here at home we have 24/7 access to what they’re reporting.
That’s in contrast to the days when we had to be a little more innovative to get some stories out. One night in the Soviet Union, for example, after we had captured remarkable video of KGB agents roughing up Soviet citizens on “International Human Rights Day,” we wanted to transmit it to the United States. But the censor in the control room at Moscow TV sat with her finger on a button to cut us off at the first offense, and the only way to distract her was to set off a small explosion— our Moscow-based video editor fortuitously was a former U.S. Army explosives expert. It worked. The censor leapt from her chair and along with the rest of us, fled from the building. I got kicked out of the country, but our story got on the air. In Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion, we used a lower-tech technique to bypass suffocating controls, removing videotapes from their cassettes and spooling them tight around a pencil and paying a king’s ransom to civilian couriers to conceal them in their clothing and deliver “the package” to our people on the outside.
Journalists today in a place like Ukraine don’t have to do things like that. But that’s almost where the differences end. They’re still vulnerable to the same dangers my generation faced and, more important, the same dangers every besieged Ukrainian faces. They can manage the risks, but they can’t escape them.
Over almost 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 has covered presidencies and politics at home and international 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, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
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