Abstract
During a brief pause in broadcasting, I stepped away from the freezing balcony that had become my temporary studio in Kyiv, and the words of our security guy sent shudders through me. “The Ramsey team has been hit, it’s bad.” Suddenly my thoughts raced back almost 20 years to Iraq. That time it had been a call from London. “The Lloyd team has been hit, it doesn’t look good.”
It was a different war, different broadcasting organisations and different outcomes. Sky’s Stuart Ramsey and his team somehow survived largely intact. ITN’s Terry Lloyd was killed, as were his cameraman Fred Nerac and his fixer Hussein Osman. Another cameraman, Daniel Demoustier, who was driving the vehicle carrying Terry, miraculously survived. I was nearby with my team. We drove to pick him up. He was paralysed with fear, trauma and shock.
But there are also some similarities. Both incidents were at the beginning of the war, both involved vehicles coming under intense fire, and both were experienced teams led by correspondents who had covered many conflicts. Neither were on foolhardy missions. Rather, they had planned what they were doing, taking a carefully calculated risk, and proceeding cautiously. But in war, particularly in the first hours and days, it is often a fluid, fast-moving and unpredictable battlefield.
The point to make about both these awful incidents is that these were British TV journalists doing what the very best conflict reporters do. They were going out to bear witness, in this case to an outrageous act of aggression by Putin’s Russia, to see first-hand what war in Europe means in the 21st century. And we saw very quickly – again, thanks to British TV journalists and others on the ground – that it means the same as most wars. It means countless lives suddenly thrown into despair, it means brutality and rape and other war crimes, and it also means that journalists need to be there to record it, in all its horror, regardless of the danger.
The ambush of the Ramsey team was, of course, a warning of how dangerous the war could be for journalists. In most wars I have covered, there have been British or American troops involved. They are a source of information, a shield of protection if you need it, and in some cases it’s possible to embed with them – with all the benefits and disadvantages that can bring. But in Ukraine there were no such forces. The Ukrainians will help reporters and camera crews, and see the benefits of doing so, but they are fighting for survival and have different priorities. The Russians have, at best, an ambivalent attitude to western journalists they do not control.
For years, wars have been fought to some extent on television, and Ukraine is no exception. But this is also war in the time of TikTok, a social media war where short clips of content have a direct impact. The moment a missile strikes, so often caught by CCTV. Civilians with mobile phones always on hand to capture the aftermath of attacks, and political leaders well aware of the ease and immediacy of the message they can send. It is, of course, new source material for hungry journalists. But it all comes with a warning: is it trustworthy and is it credible? The reputation of a news organisation takes years to build. These days, a failure to check or verify material online can threaten that reputation in minutes.
Artillery homes in on live TV signals
And all this alongside the rapidly developing technology of television news. It is possible now to broadcast live from almost anywhere – but just because you can doesn’t mean you should . Live signals very quickly attract attention from those who might not want you there. When we went into Saltivka, a northern suburb of Kharkiv under almost constant Russian shelling at the time, it was with pretty strict conditions imposed by our security adviser. He had studied an app that monitored the shelling and saw it mostly occurred in the early afternoon and evening. He wanted us to go into the area for an hour in the morning with no live broadcasting. I negotiated two hours and he agreed. But as we left, around lunchtime, the shelling resumed and a CNN crew were caught up in it, though they got out largely unharmed.
Drones have become serious weapons of war, but also very useful tools of television. Herein lies another danger of this war for journalists. I saw drones being deployed by TV crews. They produce great pictures but also attract attention from the military. I know of incidents where a shell landed perilously close to a camera crew doing its “drone journalism”.
There is a sense that, as the war progresses, the western media are losing interest. It is not what the Ukrainians want to hear. I saw an op-ed piece in the Kyiv Post the other day in which the writer said this: “As the bloody war rages on in Ukraine which has displaced and destroyed the lives of millions of innocent Ukrainians, it seems that British journalism no longer cares about reporting the realities on the ground.” (Ramsha Afridi, July 15).
I believe that is wrong. Most serious news organisations are keeping a presence in Ukraine: in many cases , a substantial one. It is true that war fatigue impacts viewers and readers. I saw it with Bosnia, a conflict that lasted several years.
But with Ukraine, I fervently hope British journalism stays the distance. It is important, and for this reason: I believe war reporting is more about the people trapped by the fighting than it is about the fighting itself. It is about the blighted lives and the smashed homes and the testimonies told through tears, often falteringly but always with a visceral anger. For more often than not, they will be people who have lost the world they knew. They are Putin’s innocent victims and they deserve a hearing from us. It is the very least we owe them.
