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As always the article is available for download as a Word-document on the final page (p. 11)
FOURTH QUARTER 2003: |
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10:11
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Tell Me What You See
What are the special challenges of war-reporting?
KR: I don’t really like the term ‘war reporter’: I am just a reporter who has happened to have been around when there were a lot of wars going on. I keep getting sent to them, but it’s not something I wanted to be as a specialist or anything. The problem is: once you’ve done one they keep sending you back because they think you know how to “do them”. Basically, you try to do it like any other reporting job. In one sense it’s actually easier, because in a war – at least in Iraq and Afghanistan – all you can write is what is in front of you. Especially when you’re in places with no communication: I am not watching CNN, not reading AP and Reuters. All I know when I was around Basra, in Afghanistan or even in Somalia was what I can see in front of me that day and talk to some people, and I can write it. Usually, that ended up being completely different from what they were saying at the Pentagon or at the command briefings.
That’s the best kind of reporting: being on the ground, just reporting what you see. That’s also what I tell my interns: when you go to a demonstration, don’t listen to the organizers who say there were 40.000 or the police who says there were 10.000 people: tell me what you see. Don’t talk to the leader of the group, go in to the group and talk to average people about why they came. That’s all you can do, and it’s the same thing when you’re covering a war: just write what you see.
Another of the recurrent themes of your book is meeting death in those extreme catastrophes. For the public back home, it is exactly the famine victims and maimed civilians that we know we have an obligation to face – but don’t want to. How do you deal with that?
KR: The job of the reporter, I think, is to throw it in your face. You want people to look at things that might make them uncomfortable. The Somali famine was the classic example. I took my own photographs, and I was constantly getting calls from the office saying: “Ew, did you have to send this stick-finger boy that’s half dead lying on the ground?” And I said: “Yeah, that’s the front page picture, put it in there!” So your job is to be the advocate, to get people to care about things – whether it’s a famine or about how nasty war is. After the Gulf War we have gotten used to watching wars from videos of bombs going in to targets: Clinical war. Our job on the ground is to say: well, actually that bomb went a block away and hit this house and killed these six people, and let me describe how their bodies were lying around. And here’s the photo!
That’s the job of the journalist: to get beyond the clinical nature of war that people would like it to be, and show you that there are real people involved, real people getting killed. One of the stories I was glad that I did out of Iraq was talking to an old guy who lost most of his family members, 8 or 9 children and grandchildren, who were killed by a US missile that went astray. Letting people know that this isn’t just smart bombs hitting military targets. We might say that the war was a great success since we got to Baghdad in three days – but hey, there’s a guy back here that lost his family. That’s the best job a war reporter can do I think. That’s how I see my job: just writing what I see out there, on the ground.
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Photo (illustration): BrunoInBaghdad.com
Photo (portrait):
Francesca
Luk
