Speaking today about journalism at the Chautauqua Institution, ABC News president David Westin spoke about Iraq war coverage and posed “the most basic ethical question:” “Is it right or is it wrong for us to pursue this important story even at the risk of our colleagues losing their lives?” An excerpt:
| We may not be able to go where we want in Iraq. We may not be able to talk with everyone we would like. But as long as we can give the American people a better understanding of what’s going on over there, then we should remain. But the corollary is also true. If we reach the point that we are no longer able to report — really report — on Iraq from inside the country, we have a moral obligation to ask ourselves some very hard questions about why we, as journalists, are there. Speaking for ABC News, we have not yet reached that point. Despite all the limitations, there still is precious reporting coming out of Iraq — reporting that is vital for the American people, who will ultimately determine our future course in this critical conflict. |
Click continued to read his comments in full…
Every day that we are in Iraq, we have to ask ourselves the most basic ethical question: Is it right or is it wrong for us to pursue this important story even at the risk of our colleagues losing their lives? At what point does our mission of reporting the news become unethically dangerous for the people we send?
Back in early 2003, we began coverage of the Iraq war with a new program for embedded journalists. You’ll recall that this program put U.S. journalists into combat units to report on the war from inside the military – indeed, from inside the fighting.
At the time, we had worries about this new program. There was the physical danger for our people. I remember well when Ted Koppel first came to me and urged me to make him our lead embedded journalist with the First Infantry Division coming up from the south to take Baghdad. I was worried about the possibility of losing Ted on the combat field. But, he knew the risks, and he persuaded me that it was important that he report on this war from the front lines.
We also worried back then that the embedding could skew our reporting on the war. In theory, the military could slant our coverage by withholding permission to report some things. And our own reporters might come to identify too closely with the military on whom their very lives depended. In the end these weren’t real problems for us.
But whether our concerns about embedding were justified at the time or not, they seem positively quaint today in light of what has happened since.
In the fall of 2003, about six months after the war had begun, ABC News aired the first of a series of reports called “Where Things Stand” in Iraq. With Time magazine, we sent teams of reporters around the country to report, not just on security, but on a variety of aspects of Iraqi life, from electricity to education to government to employment. The idea was to paint a more comprehensive picture than we were getting from seeing just the violence alone. And we more or less succeeded. Our reports, spread over all of our broadcasts, showed that some things were not so good, some were pretty good, and some things were getting better.
We’ve repeated the “Where Things Stand” series every few months since then, and each time it’s been harder and far more dangerous to send our reporters around the country to gather the information we need.
Increasingly, we find ourselves limited to reporting from our own compound, with occasional visits to the heavily fortified Green Zone or to the sprawling U.S. military complex called “Camp Victory.” We’ve come to rely more and more on surrogates, on Iraqi reporters and others who can reach areas of the country that we cannot now approach. It’s just too dangerous.
Even all these restrictions have not been enough to ensure the safety of our colleagues. All of you know about the attack that wounded Bob Woodruff and Doug Vogt in January of 2006. Bob is one of our most experienced Iraq reporters. He was embedded with the Marines entering Baghdad from the east as Ted was with the Army coming from the south. He’d been back several times since. We knew that Iraq would be the major subject when the President gave his State of the Union address that year. And so, it just made sense that as the new co-anchor of World News Tonight Bob would report from Iraq for our coverage of the State of the Union.
So there he was in a military convoy that the Army thought would give him a good view of how well the Iraqi military were working with our military. And he nearly lost his life.
I asked myself some pretty tough questions about what we were doing and why we were doing it in the days that we feared for Bob. But nothing prepared me for the criticism from some of our colleagues in the press that perhaps we should not have sent an anchor into such danger. Indeed, the New York Times on the front page characterized Bob’s reporting from Iraq as a “ratings strategy.”
Sending people to report from Iraq is about as far from a “ratings strategy” as one can get. As I explained to the editor of the Times the day after Bob’s injuries – and the day of the Times’ front page headline – our audiences would much prefer hearing about something other than the conflict in Iraq. Bob Woodruff’s reporting was no more a scheme for us to get ratings than the New York Times sending outstanding reporters to the story like John Burns to Iraq is a “circulation stunt.”
But much more important: I cannot imagine anything more wrong than sending someone into harm’s way simply for ratings or for appearance or for bravado.
The risks we’re facing in Iraq are not limited to our U.S. colleagues. At any given time, we have about 40 people working in our Baghdad Bureau; less than ten come from outside of Iraq. We rely critically on our Iraqi colleagues, not just for support, but for much of the most important reporting that we do.
Last month, two of our trusted Iraqi colleagues, Alaa Uldeen Aziz and Saif Laith Yousuf were taken by armed men as they reached home after a day of work in our Baghdad Bureau. Their families found them dead in the Baghdad morgue the next morning. We will probably never know exactly why Alaa and Saif were murdered, which in itself indicates the level of lawlessness in Iraq today. But the fact that they worked for us certainly did them no good, and quite possibly led to their deaths.
How do we justify putting our colleagues in deadly danger every single day that they are in Iraq?
It’s no answer to say simply that everyone covering Iraq for us volunteers for the assignment. We can’t delegate the responsibility of weighing the risk to those directly exposed to it. War reporters are a special breed. They’re close to the action, which gives them a unique perspective. But sometimes they’re so close that they can lose perspective.
Those of us outside the danger zone have to be accountable for the decision whether to go forward or to pull back. We never want anyone to question what is unquestionable: the courage of our reporters.
How much risk we should take in covering a story once again comes back to why we do anything that we do. It’s about the reporting. Whatever our personal views, the story unfolding daily in Iraq is perhaps the most important story in the world today. What happens over there will affect Iraq itself, the United States, the middle east, and indeed the entire world for years to come. And, we continue to have over 160,000 United States soldiers and marines on the ground in Iraq even as we speak.
We may not be able to go where we want in Iraq. We may not be able to talk with everyone we would like. But as long as we can give the American people a better understanding of what’s going on over there, then we should remain.
But the corollary is also true. If we reach the point that we are no longer able to report – really report – on Iraq from inside the country, we have a moral obligation to ask ourselves some very hard questions about why we, as journalists, are there.
Speaking for ABC News, we have not yet reached that point. Despite all the limitations, there still is precious reporting coming out of Iraq – reporting that is vital for the American people, who will ultimately determine our future course in this critical conflict. We therefore maintain a substantial presence in Baghdad despite the losses that we have suffered, the many near-misses, and the risks that our colleagues endure every day. And, we’ll continue to weigh constantly the risks against the reporting.