International News Safety Institute established

IN Media Freedom | 10/05/2003

Chris Cramer

In Brussels last week on World Press Freedom Day around 100 media organisations came together to officially launch the International News Safety Institute (INSI), a new organisation dedicated to the safety and well being of media workers throughout the world. In this guest column, its first president, Chris Cramer suggests that the main task of the organisation will be to examine what lessons can be learnt from those media who died while covering the conflict in  Iraq.

I read recently that if the grisly death toll among our colleagues in Iraq - 14 dead and another two still missing, feared dead, at time of writing - was compared to media casualties during the Vietnam war, and extrapolated over the 15 years of that conflict, then we would have suffered at least 2,500 dead and many more injured.

A stretch maybe, but that is the context for any investigation into the numbers of correspondents and reporters, cameramen and sound recordists, translators and support staff, who lost their lives between the outbreak of the Iraq war on March 19 and the generally accepted end to the hostilities on April 14.

It gives me no comfort to remind the industry that many of us in the business predicted long ago that this was likely to be the worst ever period for media workers, with thousands in harm’s way and most of them on the very front line of any battle between the US and its allies and the Iraqi forces.

Apart from the risk of being caught up in the fighting --- media "embeds" with the US and British military, hundreds more operating as "unilaterals", and many more reporting on the conflict from the Iraqi capital, Baghdad - it was very clear that the risks for media around the world have already reached an all-time high for those colleagues in hostile environs. The past few years have seen media deaths soar as competition and technology places frontline coverage within the grasp of increasing numbers of TV radio and newspaper organisations. And this easy access has coincided with new risks as many regimes and factions around the world see journalists as legitimate targets for assault, robbery, kidnap and frequently murder.

In short, many of us saw this death toll coming. And saw it as the single greatest nightmare as we spent months planning our deployments and coverage of the possible conflict. The industry leaders in the area of safety -like CNN, BBC, ITN, Reuters and APTN and many responsible newspapers - mandated prolonged safety training for their staff, personal protective equipment, detailed guidelines on how to operate in dangerous areas, chemical/biological training and clothing provision, and much more.

But media bosses were sending their staff to do a job which was inherently unsafe, operating in conditions where all the safety training and equipment in the world might not save all of their lives.  And it didn’t.

What those same media bosses need to do now ---after they have mourned, honoured and buried their staff and made provisions for their families --- is to examine the circumstances of their deaths with great precision.  Some have started already.

Sadly, there are many media organisations that have experience of this in recent years.  In the case of the BBC it was the death of reporter John Schofield in Bosnia and a freelance team in Northern Iraq that paved the way for that organisation’s major advances in the area of safety training. It was after Schofield’s death that BBC News drew up controversial guidelines declaring that "no story is worth a life, no piece of audio or picture sequence worth a serious injury".  At CNN, freelance deaths in Somalia and gruesome injuries suffered by staffers like Margaret Moth in Bosnia, who was badly injured from a sniper attack, were examined and used to determine the network’s stringent safety policies.

In the same way, now that the Iraq war is over, it behoves the industry to look at how each and every casualty from this conflict occurred and learn lessons which might benefit those who are assigned to the next trouble spot.

In doing so we should avoid the clumsy science of hindsight. We should confine ourselves to the circumstances of their deaths. Were they caught in crossfire?  Were they killed by so-called "friendly" fire, an ugly misnomer if ever there was one? Were their deaths caused by unavoidable vehicle accident or, as in the case of NBC’s David Bloom, apparently by fatal embolism brought on by constant travel in cramped conditions? And, crucially, the industry needs to know the exact circumstances of the deaths of journalists in the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad and the Al-Jazeera offices nearby. 

We should also investigate those hair-raising "near-misses" suffered by many media employees in Iraq during the war. Learn lessons about the CNN team in Tikrit who were saved only by an armed escort firing on border guards after they attacked the CNN convoy and then pursued it by car.

At the launching of the International News Safety Institute in Brussels last week there was also a call to finally address the issue of those media groups who sent their staff to Iraq with no safety training, guidelines or equipment.  And maybe "name them and shame them". Also to reach out to other media --- the newly emerging Arab press and those in Africa and Central and South America - to ensure they are not excluded from any improvements in protecting their staff.

Any detailed examination of the dead and injured from this conflict will be incomplete without asking some searching questions about the state and status of the media.  Why is it that, as suggested, there are some factions around the world who hate us so much they would like us dead? Is it just the big media organizations that are seen by some to represent the unpopular governments in the countries in which they are based?  Or is it maybe because somewhere along the line some journalists have surrendered their impartiality? Is it now fashionable to be jingoistic, even xenophobic, in our reporting? Have some parts of the media abandoned the notion that ours is a precious craft, a public and civic duty? This is an important issue and one that needs to be fully debated in due course.

For now we should all grieve for those of our colleagues who have given their lives to cover the terrible events of the past few weeks. And we should give thanks for many hundreds more who are on their way back after probably the most terrifying experience of their personal and professional lives. Many of them will be unaffected by what they did and saw and reported on.  They will probably just pick up their lives where they left off. Good luck to them. Many others will be profoundly affected by this war and their part in it. Some will be distressed and some will be in real pain. They will need our understanding, our comfort and our total support.

Chris Cramer, the first honorary President of INSI is also President, CNN International Networks.