As CPJ marks its 25th anniversary, our early board members and former directors look ahead to the emerging challenges facing the international press. Moderator John Carroll, Knight visiting lecturer at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard, leads the panel in a two-week discussion about Iraq, national security, Internet censorship, and the new threats to press freedom.
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Posted July 19, 2006
From John Carroll: Good morning. In Iraq, Afghanistan and other dangerous spots, CPJ research shows international news organizations relying heavily on freelance reporters, fixers and other non-staff assistants. What ethical responsibilities do ethical news organizations bear for their well-being? Should they be treated the same as staffers? What is the actual practice?
A media climate that exploits
From Josh Friedman: Traditionally, what separated freelancers, fixers, drivers, and interpreters from big-footed full-time staffers were corporate benefits and extras.That was fine as long as the difference meant flying first or business class, dining well on a fat expense account or receiving a lot more pay. But that was the old days and things are different. Now corporate benefits like insurance and money to pay for bodyguards, hardened cars, and a safe place to stay overnight are often necessities. Employers, however, are dragging their feet in recognizing their new obligations.
Here is what is different:
• It used to be that rich big media enterprises had plenty of full-time people running around the world. Now, the number of full-time American journalists overseas is relatively small. Local staff and freelancers are making up the difference and, thus, must be given a new employment status.
•There are several reasons for the shrinking American journalistic presence overseas, most revolving around money. Broadcast networks have closed bureaus because cable is cutting into their profits. Big newspapers are closing bureaus because ad revenue and readership is dropping. A few media companies are gobbling up papers with bureaus and closing them. Tribune is a good example. I used to jet around the world business class for Newsday and run into friends and rivals from the Baltimore Sun, the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune. Tribune owns them all now and the Chicago bean counters have just decided the entire group of papers can cover important foreign stories with just one person.
• Digital technology like sat phones, Internet, and digital cameras makes it easier and cheaper for a young freelancer to cover stories and communicate with their clients in the states. When I was overseas and wanted to send back photos, I hired a photographer and we sent the pictures back via AP. Now anyone can snap a digital photo and e-mail it back from the most remote place with a sat phone. It’s like Al Franken’s one-man uplink character on “Saturday Night Live.”
• So the jobs for freelancers are there and the means to do them are there. This is not lost on aspiring young journalists. Rather than work their way up doing local stories for a paper or broadcaster, it makes more sense for them to their pack bags, buy digital still and video cameras and head off to a trouble spot—the more remote and festering the better. This is something I see every year as students graduate from my International Reporting class at the Columbia J-School. Those are the people who need corporate protection and don’t get it. Inexperienced, often traveling alone into strange territory, these young people are prime candidates for trouble.
• And one last thing. Employers of freelancers have to offer this protection openly. Merely asking a young freelancer if he or she wants and needs expensive protection in a place like Iraq is pretty manipulative. Anyone who demands this expense runs the risk of being dropped for someone who is cheaper.
Speak up for fixers, stringers
From Ann Cooper: Freelancers, fixers, and support staff such as drivers and translators are crucial elements of getting the story in dangerous, remote parts of the globe. To understand their important role, think of The Killing Fields and Dith Pran, the translator/fixer who worked side by side with Sydney Schanberg of The New York Times, a 1976 Pulitzer Prize winner for his coverage of Cambodia.
The relationship between foreign correspondent and fixer can be very close, as they share danger and difficult conditions to cover war or other dramatic events. As a result, many correspondents in the field quite naturally feel the same responsibility for their non-staff assistants that they would for a full-fledged staff colleague. A colleague of mine from NPR once successfully prevented the abduction of his translator, a Rwandan refugee, by hugging him as hard as he could so that Rwandan border guards could not drag him away to what likely would have been a violent fate. It was no more, no less than what he might have done for a fellow radio reporter.
That same sense of responsibility has not always been evident back in the newsroom (some would consider this quite an understatement!). Freelancers and fixers have often worked without medical coverage or other protections enjoyed by staff correspondents. But attitudes have changed, and I believe that among U.S. news organizations there is a much greater sense of responsibility—particularly since the beginning of the Iraq conflict.
So what are the ethical responsibilities, and should these less-than-full-fledged-staffers be treated the same as staffers? CPJ’s guidebook on journalist safety strongly urges media organizations to provide freelancers and fixers with safety equipment, to cover their medical needs if necessary, and to take the same responsibility for them that they would for staff correspondents. I don’t think that means that a local driver or translator has to be on the company health plan, which may be impractical or impossible. But it does mean that if that driver or translator comes to harm while working for your news organization, you need to step up and take full responsibility for his or her well-being—including meeting medical needs and helping take care of family that may have lost its means of support.
By this standard, I think the actual practice today is pretty good. CPJ knows of a number of cases of Iraqis whose American news company employers have cared for them after violent attacks or arranged their evacuation from Iraq because of violent threats connected to their work. CPJ itself can often help with such cases.
One area where some companies are reticent is in standing up for Iraqi employees who are detained by U.S. forces. Over the past couple of years CPJ has documented a number of cases of such detentions, in which U.S. military forces have held Iraqi employees of Western media companies for weeks or months at a time, then released them without charge. CPJ’s position has been: If the U.S. military has evidence to hold an Iraqi journalist working for Western media, it should bring charges against that journalist in a timely fashion. If it does not have evidence, due process demands a timely release.
Some Western news organizations have made this same argument publicly; others have chosen to keep the detentions quiet and work behind the scenes. The public approach does not always prompt a quick release. But it does ensure that the U.S. military is held accountable for this deplorable practice of detention without due process.
Complicated scenarios
From Anne Nelson: Although it is clear that Western news organizations should take responsibility for stringers and freelancers in cases of injury and abuse, the real-life scenarios can be extremely complicated. In many cases, the families of stringers who live in the conflicted area can become targets for retaliation. News organizations often try to get stringers who have been threatened out of the country to safety (and CPJ has assisted with a number of these cases). But when that responsibility is extended to family members, the cost and logistics can be overwhelming.
Likewise, medical treatment has become more sophisticated—but more costly. A single medical airlift can cost more than a stringer earns for years of work. It will be interesting to see how these factors play out in the current conflict in Iraq. I’m pleased to see that some news organizations, such as The New York Times, have come a long way in giving stringers credit for their work.
Stringers and freelancers can only become more essential to U.S. news coverage given the paucity of U.S. staff reporters with the language skills and the willingness to do necessary field reporting, and the overall diminution of foreign reporting staff and bureaus.
Questioning a single standard
From Franz Allina: It can depend on what the responsibility is. It seems unsustainable to apply a double standard in supplying safety equipment—staffers get the best bullet-proof vests, for example, while stringers and other nonstaff receive inferior gear or none.
Should a single standard also apply when governments or terrorists threaten or commit violence against news personnel or when news personnel are detained or kidnapped?
Harsh as it may, a double standard for protection here can be acceptable: Staffers can legitimately hold employers to a higher level of responsibility than can stringers and other nonstaff.
Why? This seems terribly unfair. Stringers, fixers, and other nonstaff are more vulnerable than staff to threats and acts of violence and to detention and abduction. Moreover, the nonstaff victims far outnumber the victims who are on staff.
It is unfair. But news organizations are less able to control their choices of stringers and other nonstaff than in hiring and supervising their staffs. News organizations know less about the backgrounds of nonstaff, and they have less effective control over their comings and goings and conduct. In dangerous theaters it may not be possible to hold news organizations to a single standard of care for the safety of staff and nonstaff personnel.
READER RESPONSE
A need to transcend rivalries, budgets
From Rodney Pinder, director International News Safety Institute: Way back in 2000, the Freedom Forum in London organized a debate on journalist safety following the tragic deaths of Kurt Schork of Reuters and Miguel Gil Moreno of APTN in Sierra Leone. At the urging of Gil’s family, practical action aimed at addressing equally the safety of staff and freelancers in conflict zones resulted from the heat generated by the audience of news professionals.
News executives who were present decided to meet among themselves to see if they could fashion a code of practice that would embrace a new commitment to provide the training and protection urged by the family and demanded by the new dangers facing conflict reporters around the world. A few weeks later, in Gil’s native Spain at the News World international conference in Barcelona, a new code of practice supported by the BBC, CNN, Reuters, APTN, and ITN was made public. From the outset, staffers and freelances, journalists and support workers such as fixers, drivers and translators, were addressed as equals when it came to safety.
Speaking on behalf of the group, Richard Sambrook of the BBC said: “This agreement represents unprecedented cooperation between competitors in the broadcast news industry to try to protect all journalists, staff and freelance, working in dangerous conditions. It’s a starting point, not a final position. Our aim is to limit risk and to take responsibility for anyone working on our behalf in war zones or hostile environments.”
The 8-point code included these clauses:
• All staff and freelances asked to work in hostile environments must have access to appropriate safety training and retraining. Employers are urged to make this mandatory.
• Employers must provide efficient safety equipment to all staff and freelances assigned to hazardous locations, including personal issue Kevlar vest jackets, protective headgear and properly protected vehicles if necessary.
• All staff and freelances should be afforded personal insurance while working in hostile areas including cover against death and personal injury.
• Employers to provide and encourage the use of voluntary and confidential counseling for staff and freelances returning from hostile areas after the coverage of distressing events
The BBC, ITN, CNN, Reuters and APTN were later joined by Channel 4, CBS, NBC, ABC, Sky, Fox and Al Jazeera in the London-based Broadcast News Security Group. These highly competitive news organizations uniquely agreed to set rivalry aside when it came to the safety of journalists and others in their newsgathering teams. All subscribe to the safety code.
Two years later, a coalition of news organizations, journalist support groups such as the CPJ, IPI and IFJ and humanitarian organizations agreed to set up the International News Safety Institute (INSI) to focus on issues concerning the safety of journalists, local and international, staff and freelance, working in hostile environments. INSI, fundamentally a safety network, drew up its own safety code based on that of the News Security Group (to which it belongs). It also urges no discrimination between staff and freelances, journalists or support workers on issues of safety and security.
More than 60 news organizations and support groups now subscribe to that code of practice through their membership of INSI. Of course, that is a relatively tiny number among thousands of news organizations, and it grows slowly, but it is what Sambrook called “a starting point, not a final position.”
It remains frustrating and perplexing that so many news organizations are reluctant to get to get to that final position and appear still to put the budget before the bravery of those who go into danger to provide their news.
FOLLOW-UP
In fixer relationships, is too much unstated?
From Jane Kramer: Back to the question about protecting field assistants, fixers, translators, stringers, etc. who might be in danger because of their connection to you, or because of the kind of work you have them do. It occurs to me now that this isn’t a subject I’ve ever even talked to my own editor or publisher or house lawyer about. I wonder how many of us have. Perhaps it might be a good idea for all of us at CPJ to contribute to some kind of list of questions for journalists to ask their offices—a list that would help them clarify the extent of their papers’ commitments—financially, physically, legally, and politically—and to understand the extent of their own responsibilities. I haven’t been reporting from a war zone for several years, but I often work in places where the people I take on are in considerable danger of retaliation or harassment once I’ve left—most recently in North Africa late this spring. I don’t know the policy in other papers and magazines, but at The New Yorker it’s I (and not the magazine) who does this kind of short-term hiring directly, usually once I’ve arrived somewhere and can ask around among contacts I trust. The people work for me directly, not for the magazine. So the responsibility is technically mine. I’ve always assumed the magazine would go to bat for anyone working for me on a piece, but my point is I’ve never asked.
Back in the 1970s, a very gifted Arabic and Berber translator I’d used for a series from Morocco had to go into hiding after the next person he’d helped wrote something extremely critical of the regime and mentioned him by name, by way of a thank you. Thirty years later, he is still in hiding. One has to assume that in, say, covering the war in Iraq, people who work for foreign reporters know the risks they’re taking, but in more ambiguous situations—you could say peaceful but forbidding situations—it’s not clear that local helpers always understand what could happen to them. Or they need the money, they want the contact, they presume that you offer some sort of safety just by being foreign. Magazine journalists tend to disappear back into their own lives after a long and fairly intense stretch of research in the field. There is no local bureau to which a field assistant can appeal if he or she has problems once the reporter is gone.
Anyway, I do think that we could be very useful if we put together a check list of questions and guidelines that reporters could use to clarify where their publications stand, where they stand, and where the people they’d like to protect as much as possible stand.