Black holes

Can conflict reporting survive the digital age?

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On April 2, four members of the Somali-based terrorist group al-Shaba stormed the campus of Garissa University in Northern Kenya. By the end of the ensuing standoff with Kenyan authorities, 147 people were dead and another 79 wounded.

But why was the university attacked?

On April 20, a boat carrying more than a thousand refugees headed to Europe from North Africa sank off the coast of Libya. As of press time, it is feared that as many as 900 refugees have drowned. In addition, distress calls have been received from two other vessels carrying several hundred more refugees.

The death toll is reported up to the minute, but why aren’t we being told why these refugees are fleeing or what conditions caused them to risk their lives on such a perilous crossing?

In Northern Iraq, even as this article is being written, the U.S. military is flying air support for Iranian Shiites who are fighting the Sunni members of the Islamic State (IS). At the same time just 1,200 miles to the south, U.S. warships off the coast of Yemen are preparing for combat against Iranian naval vessels that are taking arms shipments to Shiite rebels attempting to topple the mostly Sunni-led government of Yemen. So how is it the U.S. can be both fighting along side and against the Iranians at the exact same time?

These are just a few current examples of the type of confusing, context-free reporting making its way out of the world’s black holes, those trouble spots that have become so dangerous that few reporters, if any, dare set foot in them.

For years, we have relied on the critical information provided by conflict photographers and reporters to help us understand the complexities of the world’s warzones and the ramifications of what is happening both on the battlefields and behind the scenes.

But today, as more and more of these specialized journalists are being killed, kidnapped and under supported financially, the black holes are growing as they trap ever more of the credible information that once found its way to the outside world.

Ironically, much of this information void can be attributed to our own advancements in communication technology.

“Tech has always been extremely helpful in allowing us to do this important work, but there is a downside now because the technology is also available to the warring parties,” says Greg Campbell, award-winning journalist, author, filmmaker and veteran reporter of numerous conflicts, including a recent venture into northern Iraq. “Unlike when I started reporting back in Bosnia in the 1990s, there’s no longer a concept that the people fighting need the media to tell their side of the story. Back then you could just put something on your helmet or your car to identify yourself as a journalist and that made people think twice about killing you or kidnapping you because they didn’t want the bad publicity of firing on a journalist. It was still dangerous but not like today.

“What has happened since then is all of this technology — the video cameras, the cell phones, the blogging tools, the ease of online publishing and the Internet — are in the hands of the people who are actually doing the fighting themselves. So to them the media has become superfluous. Because they’re telling their own story, they now see journalists only as walking dollar signs. So it has become incredibly dangerous if not downright impossible to do your job in many places.”

Journalist Greg Campbell (left) with friend and conflict photographer Chris Hondros in Pristina, Kosovo in 1999. Hondros was killed by a mortar in Libya in 2011 along with fellow photographer Tim Heatherington. courtesy Greg Campbell

There’s no better example of Campbell’s point than Islamic State (ISIS), which now controls large swaths of Syria and Iraq and has affiliated fighters in Yemen, Libya and other parts of the Muslim world.

ISIS has its own media branch with professional-caliber videographers, editors and social media experts to tell their story. Al-Qaeda publishes its own magazine titled Inspire. But such media content has little to do with journalism.

ISIS releases videos of beheadings, torture and captives being burned alive. The idea being to show its resolve and to strike fear into its enemies, as well as to provoke military responses from appalled governments in the region and the West. It has worked well.

The group also uses social media to recruit converts to its cause from all over the world. That too has proven an effective ploy.

In the past, much of the propaganda being dispensed by ISIS would have been countered by credible reports from the international press corps. But very few journalists have dared to operate in ISIS territory and many of those who have are now hostages or have been executed.

The same technology that has long made it possible for conflict journalists to get their story out is now being used to track them down and kill or capture them. For instance, at the beginning of the conflict in Syria, several experienced war correspondents were killed by the Assad forces that intentionally targeted their cell phone signals for missile attacks.

“Things have really changed,” says Campbell. “Most of the training out there now is like special forces training. You learn to track your digital footprint so that people can’t track your emails and figure out where you’re going to be. When you’re working you can’t post on Facebook and you have to let your social media accounts go dark. You have to think of everything.

“You don’t just walk up and check in under your name at your hotel. Those who want to hurt you are out there reading this stuff and they are just as sophisticated as Google when it comes to figuring out how to locate you. And it’s not just the warring groups you came to cover you have to worry about. It can be the cab driver, the desk clerk, even your driver or fixer — anybody who might be willing to sell you to those who want to silence your reporting by beheading or holding you for ransom. So this is all new information we have to learn.”

As if it isn’t difficult enough to report from these modern war zones where conflict journalists have become just another target, the funding it takes to do this type of reporting is drying up at a disturbing rate.

Again, it is technology playing the role of spoiler. Despite the lack of any viable business model to do so, major daily newspapers and network and cable news organizations are attempting to transform themselves into digital-centric organizations. This failed transformation in response to digital technology has sent revenues spiraling downwards and subsequently led to the elimination of the vast majority of financial support for expensive conflict reporting.

Today, conflict reporting is most often left to freelance journalists who are increasingly expected to finance their own operations. It is a daunting undertaking.

“The average freelancer has to pay for an astonishing array of things,” says Campbell. “It’s not just his or her plane tickets there and back, but things like body armor, which runs $1,500 to $2,000. You have to provide your own equipment, so an expensive collection of cameras and video equipment is required along with your own laptop.

“You need medical training so you can save your own life or that of someone you’re with when things go wrong. Some of this training is free, like the [Reporters Instructed in Saving Colleagues] (RISC) program founded by journalist Sebastian Junger, but some is very expensive. And then when you get to the country you’re going to report from, you have to hire a staff, drivers, fixers, translators. It’s not uncommon for those people to be paid more on a daily basis than the freelance reporter will make. They can run as high as $300 each. And then, if you are lucky enough to sell your photographs, video or story, you can maybe break even. And if you’re really lucky, you can even make a little money so you can put it towards the next trip. I didn’t even talk about insurance on yourself and your gear — it’s ridiculous, and all of the expense is falling on the backs of the freelancers.”

The RISC medical training program for journalists was inspired by the deaths of conflict photographers Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros in 2011 while the pair was covering the fighting in Libya that toppled Muammar Gaddafi.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, the number of conflict journalists killed has soared in recent years. In Syria alone, 17 journalists died in 2014. That makes 79 journalists killed in Syria since tensions began in 2011. Another five journalists died in Iraq in 2014. Many of those killed in recent years have been some of the world’s most experienced conflict reporters and photographers, such as Hondros, Hetherington, Marie Colvin and James Foley, just to name a very few.

Welcome to Sarajevo. March 1996. Photo by me_#3??
This photo was taken in Sarajevo during the Bosnian War, Campbell’s first venture into conflict reporting. He was covering the war for  Boulder Weekly where he was the news editor at the time. Greg Campbell

Such risk is a heavy burden to place on often inexperienced and underfunded freelancers. And yet they still come.

“There’s no manual for how to do this. You can get your medical training, you can take a course in Georgia where people will shoot at you and throw smoke bombs. But the next crop of experienced reporters always comes out of the 21-year-olds who just head into a conflict and somehow manage to survive. But that is getting much harder to do,” says Campbell. “The only way to learn is by doing and being lucky.”

So what does the future hold for conflict reporting as technology makes it an increasingly more dangerous and underfunded enterprise?

Campbell sees only two options, and he isn’t particularly optimistic about either.

“One option is to start to train locals as journalists to report from their own countries. For instance, there is a lot of information that comes out of places like Iraq and Syria from locals with cell phones. When we talk about journalists being killed, most people think of foreign journalists, but most of those killed are local citizen journalists. So providing better training to them may be the answer to getting better information about what is going on.

“The other option is to go back to giving the people doing this job, who are determined to report from the conflicts, the tools and financial backing they need to do it. News organizations need to reinvest.”

The consequences of failing to get good reporters back into the black holes grow more evident each day with the increasingly shallow reporting found on the nightly news.

“The result of all this is that you don’t know what’s going on in Syria. You don’t know what’s going on in Iraq. We know almost nothing about Somalia. Yemen is really dangerous. Libya is a complete vacuum where hardly anyone is there reporting,” says Campbell.

“And so the result is that you can only see what is happening on the periphery. We can see the migrants are fleeing and dying in boats but there is no one to tell you why, except for the survivors themselves, and that’s just one side of a story. There is no one to tell the story objectively because the journalists are simply being slaughtered.”

Campbell will be participating in a panel discussion on this issue, as well as press freedom, that is open to the public. The panel is scheduled for 6 p.m. on Tuesday, April 28, in Humanities 135, on the CU campus. Campbell will be joined by three fellow conflict reporters:

Doug Cosper — foreign correspondent, international journalism trainer and Fulbright scholar.

Bruce Finley — Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist with on-sight reporting experience in more than 40 countries.

Delphine Halgand — French journalist and U.S. director for Reporters Without Borders.

The panel is part of the larger programming being provided by the University of Colorado’s Media, Culture and Globalization class in its efforts to promote World Press Freedom Day on campus and around Boulder from April 27 to May 3.

This programming will kick off on April 27, with a flagging ceremony at Norlin Quad on the CU-Boulder campus. A flag will be placed in recognition of each of the 380 journalists who have lost their lives while doing their jobs since 2010. Programming will conclude with a Candle Light Vigil on Sunday, May 3, on the Norlin Quad to commemorate the 20 journalists who have been killed so far this year as of April 14.

Editor’s note: As a matter of full disclosure, I have worked on and off with Greg Campbell for the past 20 years. We first met when we both worked at Boulder Weekly in the mid 1990s and I’m glad to say that I assigned him into his first war zone in Bosnia as a reporter for BW. He remains a close friend as was photographer Chris Hondros.