A journalist working for the New York Times was killed today in Iraq. According to the Times' article, the journalist “was found with his hands bound and a bag over his head in a deserted area on the outskirts of Basra, hours after being taken from his house. A relative who viewed his body in the city morgue said he had at least one bullet hole in his head and bruises on his back as if he had been beaten.†Fakher Haider was 38, married and father of 3. He was Iraqi.
As usual, this tragic death raises the question of the presence of journalists in Iraq. For sure, it is a very important story to cover. War and peace in the world for the years to come may depend on what is happening in this country today.
But Western journalists are clearly a target for the insurgents. Some journalists have been taken hostage, while others have been killed. Terrorists make no distinction between American soldiers and Western journalists. Media organizations are aware of that. They maintain in Iraq a minimal number of correspondents, who most of the time remain behind the fences of their hotel.
But is it a good solution to resort to Iraqi journalists? Is it less dangerous for them? The answer is clearly no, as Haider’s death reminds us. It is just easier to hire Iraqi, who are more willing to do this well-paid job. But I do not think this is an ethical position.
I think Western journalists should be courageous enough to either go there and do the reporting by themselves, or say every day in the paper and every night on TV that Iraq is not secure, even for journalists with armed bodyguards. Both attitudes would provide important news. Employing Iraqi journalists only gives the false impression that things are not doing so bad. I am sure that many people do not even know that a journalist working for a major American news organization died today in Iraq.
willemmarx @ September 20, 2005 - 2:09pm
The majority of Iraqi journalists are indeed very brave and courageous, no doubt about it. However, I worked this summer with a number who are not brave and courageous in the pursuit of abstract concepts such as journalism and truth, nor should they be necessarily, as this is a very rare life choice. Many of them, rather like those that take jobs with the Iraqi police forces and army (as opposed to the various militias around the country), do so out of necessity. They have families who require feeding, and this in turn requires a salary - so they take very dangerous jobs with AP, Reuters and others, while most foreign journalists stay locked up in their hotel rooms, as Laurent’s piece mentions.
Some of the older journalists in Iraq are still very excited that they are at liberty to write without the “guiding†hand of the Ba’athist party. However, those I knew were acutely aware that the independence of the Iraqi media itself was always going to be under pressure, from religious groups, political sensibilities, security threats and US interventions. Younger journalists in Iraq may have strong ideologies about the freedom of the press, but many I knew saw it as just another very dangerous job in a working environment which was unavoidably dangerous, regardless of your career choice.
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