Abstract
Although tackling different facets of journalism for different purposes, these two concise, blunt books explore the same disturbing paradox: News reporting is an increasingly dangerous effort in a world that tends to underappreciate it, making it most lethal precisely when it has never mattered more.
Both volumes mention as just one example of the new threats that journalists face the horrifying beheadings in 2014 of two American freelance journalists, James Foley and Steven Sotloff, by Islamic State militants who then posted video clips of the executions online.
Beyond the human tragedy, those episodes illustrate several crucial realities for reporting today that the books explore in depth: Dangers have become more acute because the world’s most corrupt and violent groups, propped by extensive social and digital media operations, see journalists as prizes to be targeted with impunity instead of a conduit to tell their stories. The large territories they control, such as parts of Iraq and Syria, become “unreportable” and are effectively blacked out from the world’s view.
Furthermore, as newspapers, broadcast networks, and wire services—the news organizations that provide the bulk of global news reporting—struggle to survive financially and pull back on coverage, more assignments fall to freelancers, who are even more exposed to risk than staffers backed by robust resources and training. And all this happens in a public sphere that briefly reacts with horror at the violence and then retreats to growing distrust of the “media” (a moniker so generic and diverse as to be meaningless), ignoring the real sociopolitical consequences that silencing journalists has for all of us. (Both books focus on professional journalists: Although freelance foreign correspondents might need to pick up other jobs to make ends meet, “citizen journalists” are rightly excluded, as the focus is on those whose primary mission is the pursuit of news, not advocates or participants.)
Written by three Cardiff University faculty members who combine extensive scholarly and professional experience, Reporting Dangerously finally moves the conversation about the deadly challenges journalists brave from professional and advocacy circles to journalism studies. Against the appalling background of a decades-long average of two journalists a week killed doing their job, the authors issue a clarion call for scholars of journalism more accustomed to critique than engagement: “Above all, we will argue that journalism has historically contributed an indispensable if under-recognised and insufficiently theorised role in the formation and conduct of civil societies—and continues to do so. This is why reporting from un-civil societies matters.”
Hopefully, more empirical studies will focus on that recognition and theorizing. In the meantime, Reporting Dangerously should be required reading in all journalism schools as well as human rights programs and political science departments because it provides a comprehensive account of the entire phenomenon of violence against journalists, which has been emboldened in the 21st century by changing warfare tactics, various side effects of new technologies, and the continued interest by many groups, ranging from governments to organized crime, to avoid scrutiny of their oppressive aims.
Relying on longitudinal data as well as necessarily stark vignettes of killings, Simon Cottle, Richard Sambrook, and Nick Mosdell analyze the multiple dimensions of dangers, “mapping” the trends in attacks, impunity, and chilling effects, and then usefully historicizing them in the context of globalization, humanitarianism, and shifting professional practices, particularly emphasizing “the roles and commitments of journalists reporting from unruly, uncivil places.” Interviews with about a dozen international and domestic journalists reveal the motivations and “calculus of risk” that reporters calibrate daily, whether in metropolitan newsrooms or Damascus’s rebel-held neighborhoods, and their strategies to keep safer from threats ranging from digital surveillance to ambushes in warzones.
Two chapters focus on more encompassing responses from the industry, advocacy groups, and civil society, arguing for “a wider social and political responsibility for the protection of independent journalism,” including on the part of governmental and intergovernmental institutions. Shining a spotlight on the dangers, as the book does, is surely a tremendous first step.
The Global Freelancer also devotes its final chapter to those risks, zeroing in on the particularly acute ones faced by freelancers, who are the focus of this practical book that every journalism student (or, really, anyone else) keen to cover foreign news should read.
Written by Steve Dorsey, a former freelancer who has reported from countries ranging from New Zealand to Russia and now works in Washington as executive editor/correspondent for radio at CBS News, the slim, engaging, and brutally honest volume lays out the step-by-step guide to a career as a freelance foreign correspondent. Like Reporting Dangerously, the portrait it paints of journalism is realistically unvarnished and movingly inspiring: If you’re willing to live out of “a blue REI 40-liter ‘Lookout’ backpack,” to count yourself lucky if you break even financially, and to face growing dangers, the “opportunities and experiences . . . are limitless.”
In addition to the wealth of invaluable practical information, Dorsey’s great contribution to aspiring journalists is his clear-eyed, balanced perspective on the status of foreign news reporting today and what it takes to do it. Making lemonade out of lemons, his starting premise is that the shrinking of legacy resources and foreign bureaus has created a “not ideal” situation where the public loses “valuable and important context and depth” once provided by a robust corps of correspondents, but also where freelancers are “more essential.”
In another much-needed corrective to the “fearless foolishness that only youth and reporters have,” Dorsey writes, “Anyone can be a freelance foreign correspondent”—as long as that anyone has already acquired “the ability to tell accurate, factual stories through words, photos, or digital media.”
Relying on Dorsey’s experiences as well as those of other journalists, the first half of the book highlights the necessary preparations to making the leap of faith of moving to a foreign country with a one-way ticket and no fixed job, ranging from assessing one’s motivational drive, to the kinds of photo apps to download on a smartphone, to cold-calling potential “strings.” Illustrated with in-depth published stories, the second half delves into reporting on the ground, from developing a news sense, to setting up an accounting mechanism, to braving posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
It is perhaps a fitting final paradox that Reporting Dangerously and The Global Freelancer stand out in recent journalism literature for highlighting both the eye-opening, often devastating costs reporting entails, and the vital importance of it to a more just global society.