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Minneapolis Star Tribune , MN
Jan 28 2007
When reporting the truth is a deadly pursuit
A record number of journalists were killed worldwide in 2006 for
doing their jobs.
By Kate Parry, Star Tribune Reader's Representative
Last update: January 28, 2007 - 12:39 AM
The caption explained that the young woman in the photo on Page A4
Wednesday was carrying a picture of her father as she walked ahead of
the hearse in his funeral procession in Istanbul, Turkey.
My eyes kept going back to that image. In the midst of an enormous
crowd -- 100,000 mourners -- Sera Dink looked so lost in thought, so
solitary. The word "carried" didn't really capture what she was
doing. She was embracing that portrait of her father, an
ethnic-Armenian who had been gunned down just for doing his job.
Hrant Dink was one of the first journalists to die in 2007 simply for
telling the truth. Sadly, he won't be the last. The 2006 tally was a
record, a spike up from an already horrific total the year before.
Fifty-five journalists died worldwide in 2006 because of what they do
for a living, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, a
New York-based group that keeps this disturbing tally. Of those, 32
deaths occurred in Iraq. Just four involved being caught in
crossfire. Most were journalists targeted by insurgents.
These are brave souls who risk everything to reveal what's really
going on in some of the world's most troubled locales.
Local journalists in Iraq were particularly at risk as they tried to
provide the free flow of information a democracy requires. That's
probably why they were targeted by insurgents bent on preventing a
Western-style democracy and all of its freedoms from taking root.
Since the war began in 2003, the committee reported, 92 journalists
have died in Iraq, along with 37 people who worked as support staff.
Why would a journalist volunteer for such an assignment? I put that
question to Mark Brunswick, a Star Tribune reporter at the State
Capitol who reported from Iraq embedded with the Minnesota National
Guard for four weeks in 2005 and volunteered for another six weeks in
Iraq in the fall of 2006. Brunswick said although Western journalists
are targeted by insurgents as valuable human currency, particularly
for kidnappings, he worked in relative security traveling with the
military.
But Brunswick and others have observed that the sense of immunity or
neutrality that helped safeguard journalists in past conflicts "goes
completely out the window in Iraq." The rule of thumb when reporting
on the streets of Baghdad, he said, was that a reporter had 15
minutes in any one place to do an interview before word spread that a
Western journalist was around and the risk grew too great.
Why did he want to work in that environment? "It's the ultimate issue
of our generation," said Brunswick, 50. He knew even in college that
parachuting into a conflict to reveal what was happening was
something he wanted to do. Brunswick watched the Vietnam War define
public policy debate for years after it ended and said he expects the
Iraq war also will reverberate through policy debates for many years
to come.
"A lot of people were talking about Iraq. But I knew few people who
could say what it was like boots on the ground. There's a certain
satisfaction to get a chance to be there. You can't pass that up. I
wanted to tell what it was like to be Iraqi or a soldier. I was able
to accomplish a lot of that," Brunswick said.
The constant risk, he noted, required "putting yourself in a state of
denial or you would be paralyzed."
It's likely each of those 55 journalists who died knew they were
taking a risk. They, too, must have slipped into denial or decided
reporting the truth was worth even more than their life.
Iraq wasn't the only place it was deadly to be a journalist last
year. In Russia, one of the best-known reporters in the country, Anna
Politkovskaya, 48, was gunned down in her Moscow apartment building.
She had revealed acts of torture by Russian troops in Chechnya. In
the course of her tough reporting on the government of Russian
President Vladimir Putin, she had been poisoned, threatened until she
had to leave the country for a while and thrown into jail.
The Committee to Protect Journalists reported that once Politkovskaya
was "kept in a pit for three days without food or water, while a
military officer threatened to shoot her." But when she got out, she
kept reporting.
The official investigation of her death has produced no suspects. On
Monday, a delegation from the Committee to Protect Journalists went
to Moscow to press for further action. They were told investigators
were pursuing a lead that Chechnya police might have murdered her.
Later the Foreign Ministry denied those specifics, saying only that
several "theories" were under investigation.
Most murders of journalists are never solved, often because the
investigators work for the very people annoyed by the journalist's
work, glad the bright light of scrutiny will be dimmer.
Why, beyond a basic sense of human decency, should this concern
readers of the Star Tribune in Minnesota?
The international wire reports you read in this newspaper are
possible only because reporters such as Politkovskaya take enormous
risks to let the world know what is going on in their countries.
That's a sacrifice worth thinking about the next time you read a
story with a dateline from one of the world's hot spots.
Jan 28 2007
When reporting the truth is a deadly pursuit
A record number of journalists were killed worldwide in 2006 for
doing their jobs.
By Kate Parry, Star Tribune Reader's Representative
Last update: January 28, 2007 - 12:39 AM
The caption explained that the young woman in the photo on Page A4
Wednesday was carrying a picture of her father as she walked ahead of
the hearse in his funeral procession in Istanbul, Turkey.
My eyes kept going back to that image. In the midst of an enormous
crowd -- 100,000 mourners -- Sera Dink looked so lost in thought, so
solitary. The word "carried" didn't really capture what she was
doing. She was embracing that portrait of her father, an
ethnic-Armenian who had been gunned down just for doing his job.
Hrant Dink was one of the first journalists to die in 2007 simply for
telling the truth. Sadly, he won't be the last. The 2006 tally was a
record, a spike up from an already horrific total the year before.
Fifty-five journalists died worldwide in 2006 because of what they do
for a living, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, a
New York-based group that keeps this disturbing tally. Of those, 32
deaths occurred in Iraq. Just four involved being caught in
crossfire. Most were journalists targeted by insurgents.
These are brave souls who risk everything to reveal what's really
going on in some of the world's most troubled locales.
Local journalists in Iraq were particularly at risk as they tried to
provide the free flow of information a democracy requires. That's
probably why they were targeted by insurgents bent on preventing a
Western-style democracy and all of its freedoms from taking root.
Since the war began in 2003, the committee reported, 92 journalists
have died in Iraq, along with 37 people who worked as support staff.
Why would a journalist volunteer for such an assignment? I put that
question to Mark Brunswick, a Star Tribune reporter at the State
Capitol who reported from Iraq embedded with the Minnesota National
Guard for four weeks in 2005 and volunteered for another six weeks in
Iraq in the fall of 2006. Brunswick said although Western journalists
are targeted by insurgents as valuable human currency, particularly
for kidnappings, he worked in relative security traveling with the
military.
But Brunswick and others have observed that the sense of immunity or
neutrality that helped safeguard journalists in past conflicts "goes
completely out the window in Iraq." The rule of thumb when reporting
on the streets of Baghdad, he said, was that a reporter had 15
minutes in any one place to do an interview before word spread that a
Western journalist was around and the risk grew too great.
Why did he want to work in that environment? "It's the ultimate issue
of our generation," said Brunswick, 50. He knew even in college that
parachuting into a conflict to reveal what was happening was
something he wanted to do. Brunswick watched the Vietnam War define
public policy debate for years after it ended and said he expects the
Iraq war also will reverberate through policy debates for many years
to come.
"A lot of people were talking about Iraq. But I knew few people who
could say what it was like boots on the ground. There's a certain
satisfaction to get a chance to be there. You can't pass that up. I
wanted to tell what it was like to be Iraqi or a soldier. I was able
to accomplish a lot of that," Brunswick said.
The constant risk, he noted, required "putting yourself in a state of
denial or you would be paralyzed."
It's likely each of those 55 journalists who died knew they were
taking a risk. They, too, must have slipped into denial or decided
reporting the truth was worth even more than their life.
Iraq wasn't the only place it was deadly to be a journalist last
year. In Russia, one of the best-known reporters in the country, Anna
Politkovskaya, 48, was gunned down in her Moscow apartment building.
She had revealed acts of torture by Russian troops in Chechnya. In
the course of her tough reporting on the government of Russian
President Vladimir Putin, she had been poisoned, threatened until she
had to leave the country for a while and thrown into jail.
The Committee to Protect Journalists reported that once Politkovskaya
was "kept in a pit for three days without food or water, while a
military officer threatened to shoot her." But when she got out, she
kept reporting.
The official investigation of her death has produced no suspects. On
Monday, a delegation from the Committee to Protect Journalists went
to Moscow to press for further action. They were told investigators
were pursuing a lead that Chechnya police might have murdered her.
Later the Foreign Ministry denied those specifics, saying only that
several "theories" were under investigation.
Most murders of journalists are never solved, often because the
investigators work for the very people annoyed by the journalist's
work, glad the bright light of scrutiny will be dimmer.
Why, beyond a basic sense of human decency, should this concern
readers of the Star Tribune in Minnesota?
The international wire reports you read in this newspaper are
possible only because reporters such as Politkovskaya take enormous
risks to let the world know what is going on in their countries.
That's a sacrifice worth thinking about the next time you read a
story with a dateline from one of the world's hot spots.