It first happened in Spain in the late 1930s: a conflict that acted as the starting point for a generation of reporters. Vietnam was another, as were the wars in the Balkans. To that list must now be added Libya, where the fighting has recently come to an end.
According to some estimates, at one point about 400 journalists and photographers were based in Benghazi as freelances, many covering their first conflict.
That has prompted an intense debate about both the responsibilities of news organizations using freelances and the individual responsibility of freelances themselves, triggered by a blog by New York Times photographer Michael Kamber on the Times’ Lens Blog site.
Kamber’s piece was in itself prompted by a conversation that he had had with the British photographer Tim Hetherington, who would later be killed along with Chris Hondros covering the fighting in Misrata and had talked uncomfortably about the “unbelievable number of young kids running around Libya with cameras.”
Inevitably, the Kamber blog has drawn mixed responses both in comments on the site and elsewhere, including on the Vulture Club — the closed Facebook group for those, including journalists and aid workers, who work in hostile environments.
The debate has been given extra impetus by the number of news workers who have been killed in Libya since February — 12, compared with 19 in the 10 years of conflict in Afghanistan. And it has come at a time of profound change in foreign reporting, with growing casualization and greater reliance on “local hires.”
Hannah Storm of the International News Safety Institute is concerned that only a small number of organizations sending staff or using local hires take the issue of risk management seriously — most only confronting the issue when something goes badly wrong.
“You can understand why new journalists or journalists inexperienced in covering conflict were drawn to Libya,” she said. “It was on the doorstep and there was a sense of being part of history. But it was so dangerous because it was not like a traditional war — it was fluid and unpredictable, with the anti-Qaddafi fighters often not very familiar with the weapons they were using. On top of this there has been this blurring of what it means to be a journalist, with the rise of citizen journalism and journalist--activists coming at the same time that journalists are increasingly being targeted around the world.”
Rachel Beth Anderson, a young US videographer, for whom Libya was her first conflict, says that she did not hear about the Rory Peck scheme — which offers subsidized hostile environment training — until halfway through her seven months in Libya. Now — ironically — she has been required to go on a course, after the war’s end, because she is cutting a film for the BBC that requires her to have done one before returning to Libya next month.
Like many observers, she said that too many freelances had little or no support from the media organizations for which they were providing material.
“Freelancers would call to say they were in Libya and were told: ‘We can’t support you, but if you are there and have something to file, we’ll take it,’” she said.
One exception to this has been the BBC, whose approach to safety — both for staff, freelances and local media assistants — has long been an industry standard.
“We have had to turn down material in the past on safety grounds,” BBC World News editor Jon Williams said. “Material where the reporter has gone and come back with cracking stuff, but we have not been able to take it. Then we’ve seen it appear elsewhere. But we have to be consistent.”
Williams said that the use by organizations such as the BBC of very experienced crews — and the sanitization of the footage they produce to meet broadcast standards — might give the impression to some that the reality of war is less awful and more manageable than it really is.
Like Storm, he said the main explanations for the large number of new journalists covering Libya were the ease of access to a war in which many people spoke English and the low technological and cost barriers.
“The reality is that if you have an iPhone with a 3G service you can pretty much be a broadcaster,” he said.
As the media’s foreign operations shrink, it is an issue the industry will have to confront.
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