Roy Greenslade: Face of war reporting changes as journalists become targets

There have always been risks for journalists covering conflicts. In the past, death and injury generally occurred by accident. Now it happens on purpose because reporters are targets.

From at least 2002 onwards, when the Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Pearl was abducted in Karachi and murdered by a Pakistani group linked to al Qaeda, journalistic neutrality has been ignored. Vests bearing the word “Press” no longer guarantee the wearer’s safety. Indeed, they act as an advertisement to ruthless hostage-takers who view journalists as valuable propaganda tools.

I write as a second video featuring the British freelance photojournalist John Cantlie was posted online by the sinister forces of the Islamic State (Isis). He has been their prisoner since his abduction in November 2012. He was taken with the US photographer James Foley, whose gruesome murder was filmed by Isis and posted online last month. Soon after, freelance US journalist Steven Sotloff was also murdered.

The hostage-taking and targeting of journalists — which has also been evident in the Ukraine-Russia conflict — is changing the nature of war reporting. First, and most obviously, it is inhibiting coverage, particularly by the larger, traditional news organisations.

It is noticeable that the current Isis hostages are freelances, and that fewer mainstream newspapers were prepared to sanction their staff entering Syria after the death of veteran Sunday Times correspondent Marie Colvin in February 2012.

Some broadcasters, notably the BBC, have managed to report inside Syria, clearly by taking great care about their security. Their brave chief international correspondent, Lyse Doucet, has been in and out of the country several times. She also covered the Israeli attacks on Gaza earlier in the year and, like other journalists who reported on that conflict, believes the experience of witnessing the death of children has had a marked effect on how she goes about her work. It has, to use her phrase, been responsible for “an editorial shift in my journalism”.

In other words, it has moved her away from neutrality, impartiality or objectivity towards a much more personalised, supposedly subjective, approach in which she has sided with the innocents caught up in conflict. In so many ways, that echoes what Channel 4’s Jon Snow said in a YouTube documentary about the children of Gaza, which I wrote about in this column six weeks ago.

Perhaps it is understandable that compassionate journalists confronted by the suffering of children could not possibly stand aloof. But the sympathy they show for the afflicted cannot be expressed without a criticism, even if only implied, of those who are responsible for the carnage. There, surely, is the shift that Doucet refers to, albeit obliquely.

Similarly, if the oppressors, as in Syria and Iraq, are gunning for journalists, it should not be surprising that the media coverage of them would be hostile. I have also noted a journalistic empathy with the Kurds fleeing Isis in the past couple of days.

Journalists, in theory, are not supposed to have an agenda. But treating them as enemies, particularly as they act as witnesses to the terror wrought by the very groups who threaten their life, is changing the nature and culture of journalism.