Foreign Correspondence: ABC’s Jim Sciutto On Going Back To Iraq

All this week, TVNewser is looking at the state of foreign correspondence on television, through the eyes of American reporters in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and South America.

Iraq. It’s inescapable. It’s complicated. It’s violent. And it’s deadly for journalists, as a CBS crew painfully reminded us on Monday.

ABC News senior foreign correspondent Jim Sciutto has traveled to the war-torn country twelve times since the start of the war in 2003.

While answering a question about trends in international news, it doesn’t take long for the London-based correspondent to mention Iraq.

“I think the nature of the world, post-9/11, has kept international stories on the radar screen to a consistent degree,” Sciutto says. “You’ve got Iraq. You can’t get rid of Iraq, as much as I’m sure some show producers would like to. You do hear the stats that show people turn off or switch [channels] when Iraq news is on. The fact is, you’ve gotta keep covering it.”

Some show producers would like to get rid of Iraq coverage?

“They don’t say that, but you can just watch programs to know it’s not the happiest story to cover,” Sciutto says.

His biggest frustration about Iraq involves the security situation.

“Every time you go back, you have less freedom to cover the story,” he says. “It’s personally frustrating. and it’s journalistically frustrating, because how do you connect [to people]?

Without that connection, Sciutto and correspondents like him might as well stay in London and report the story.

“Will you go back?,” I ask.

He pauses.

“I’m sure I will go again,” he says.

It must not be an easy question to answer, ever since Bob Woodruff and Doug Vogt were injured in January.

“You realize to yourself that that could very easily be you, based on the kinds of things we do over there,” Sciutto says.

After Woodruff was injured, Sciutto traveled to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany to meet his friend and colleague.

“Walking through the ward there, it’s all young men, laid out, with severe injuries. It’s that kind of thing, when you have friends injured or lost, that makes it real,” he says.

When veteran cameraman James Douglas died in Iraq Monday, Sciutto wrote about him on ABCNews.com. “James was, simply, hilarious. He made you laugh out loud — and I’m talking gut-wrenching, painful laughter — in the worst situations: an endless stint in Kabul, a dusty embed in the Kuwaiti desert, a long nerve-wracking stay in Baghdad,” he wrote.

“Nerve-wracking” doesn’t seem to do Baghdad justice. As Sciutto explains: “You’re sitting there in the bureau and you want to make a piece colorful, and to do that, you have to take risks. And then it becomes a question of how much a risk it is worth.”

“A lot of the time, it’s timing,” he adds. “It’s snap judgments.”

Sciutto has covered northern Iraq extensively for ABC, receiving two Emmy awards along the way (in 2004 and 2005, for Best Story in a Regularly Scheduled Newscast).

“The bulk of my reporting career has been overseas, which is a hard addiction to get off of,” he says.

Sciutto was the Hong Kong correspondent for Asia Business News when he joined ABC in 1998. He was assigned to Chicago for a year before being transferred to Washington, D.C. When a spot opened up in Tokyo, he couldn’t pass it up. He is now based in London.

Sciutto loves being paid to explore the world — “and when you come back, you get to sit down and craft together a little story of what you saw.”

There’s still room for that on network news, he says:

“If you look particularly at ABC’s coverage — and I’m not just saying this for P.R., but I think it’s true in terms of minutes devoted — we cover more international news than people might imagine.”