Foreign reporting is changing. With news outlets’ budgets tightening, and competition, pressure and risks on the rise, foreign journalists working in conflict countries are abandoning traditional methods of reporting in favour of using cheap, local hires to get the story:
“It used to be that you were a local journalist, and treated kind of like the Red Cross. That has completely changed,” said Callum Macrae, producer and director of Channel 4’s ‘Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields’.
“That is why we are using more and more local fixers and journalists. It’s not safe for us anymore. In the long run, maybe that’s a good thing.”
“When I saw the title of the debate, my heart skipped a beat,” argued Arun, who has worked closely with local journalists in Iraq as editor of the Institute for War & Peace Reporting.
“I didn’t want to see ‘ruining’ next to ‘local hires’ – you can’t have enough local journalists in the field.”
“I don’t think foreign correspondents can get as close to a story as a local journalist can.”
“In some cases we don’t know their [the stringer’s] real identity. He only [files] through a fake name he has provided. He’s a photographer, I’ve been told he’s legit,” she said.
“Local correspondents are paid a lot on local terms, so it’s worth the risk for them, but not a lot compared to the rest of the world. In terms of Hostile Environment courses and security, that is very new for stringers. Reuters in Afghanistan is making sure stringers are starting to get training,” she added.
“We [foreign correspondents] are doing the same job – turning it in to a narrative, getting it to a wider audience. You have to make stories into a narrative that people understand,” said Marcae.
“The slow death of the foreign correspondent is the rise of the local journalist,” said Arun.
“Just as insurgency has evolved very fast, reporting has evolved very fast. It is this new beast… It is this strange animal.”
Journalists working in areas of conflict reveal how they get information when traditional techniques are insufficient. The discussion will focus on the interaction between local hires and foreign journalists.
]]>Journalists working in areas of conflict reveal how they get information when traditional techniques are insufficient. The discussion will focus on the interaction between local hires and foreign journalists.
Local journalists are typically less conspicuous and more mobile than their foreign counterparts. They perform a vital service – bringing information from areas that are off-limits to the foreign press. Perhaps most critically for a cash-starved news industry, they are also cheaper to use than Western news gatherers.
But are they cutting corners and breaching ethics? How are the rules of reporting being rewritten by risk?
The event will be led by Richard Pendry of the University of Kent’s Centre for Journalism. While at Frontline News Television, he worked in Chechnya and across the former Soviet Union as well as Afghanistan and the Congo. He will show his film “A Strange Animal”, which focuses on the risks and rewards of adapting traditional models of news gathering. It follows local reporters in Falluja and Baghdad and looks at the phenomenon of “sub-contracting” news gathering, where local reporters pass on stories one to another when conditions are dangerous.
With:
Aamer Ahmed Khan, head of the BBC Urdu Service, has been in journalism for 25 years. He worked for the English daily newspaper The Nation in Lahore, joined the launch team of Pakistan’s first English language weekly The Friday Times as its News Editor and was special correspondent for Pakistan’s premier political magazine The Herald. He has worked with local people in Pakistan’s Tribal areas to identify the victims of US drone strikes.
Amie Ferris-Rotman, a Reuters correspondent in Kabul. She was previously a reporter in Moscow, working across the former Soviet Union covering pipeline politics, foreign policy and running stringers reporting on the Islamist insurgency in Russia’s North Caucasus.
Callum Macrae, the producer/director behind Channel 4’s multi-award winning “Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields”. Using mobile phone footage and other video footage from non-professional sources the film revealed the shocking truth behind the final operation against Tamil Tigers and the civilians trapped with them. The film led David Cameron to call on the UN to investigate the war crimes apparently revealed in the film. He has made films for the BBC, Channel 4, Al Jazeera and PBS and has reported and directed from around the world including Iraq, Sudan, Congo, Uganda, Cameroon and Ivory Coast.
Neil Arun, international editor who has produced a range of investigative stories during his time in Iraq, working with a bureau of local journalists. His own reporting from the country has been published by Vanity Fair and the Financial Times Weekend magazine. He also spent five years with the BBC, and has reported from the Balkans, Caucasus and Pakistan.
On the day after al Qaeda’s “leader” Osama bin Laden was killed by US forces in a daring raid on a nondescript compound outside Jalalabad, BBC Urdu sent out reporters into four cities across Afghanistan and Pakistan. Not to ask questions, but to observe. To sit at bus stops, to listen.
Aamer Ahmed Khan, the head of the BBC’s Urdu service, told a packed Frontline Club panel on Wednesday: “They reported back that hardly anyone was talking about it. They were talking about power cuts and security.”
He said the first joke in Pakistan was ‘oh my god it’s so dangerous here, not even Osama bin Laden is safe’.
This illustrates the disconnect between the western view of world events – and its 24-hour media cycle – and other parts of the world. For many in Pakistan, this was not earth-shattering news. But it’s huge news for the UK and even bigger in the US – so no doubt the Frontline was full of people seeking some analysis. Here’s what went down…
Lynne O’Donnell, an author and former bureau chief in Kabul for AFP, underlined the apathy felt by many in Urdu and Arabic speaking lands: “The people I’ve been speaking to in Kandahar and Kabal… say the overwhelming response is one of indiffrence. They say al Qaeda is not a man. When you think about it they have never looked at Osama bin Ladan as their leader.”
She went on to say that there are about 260 al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan – some of whom are ideologically motivated, while others are simply “supporting 10 kids and a mother-in-law, they might have three acres and the choice of whether to grow a crop or poppies”.
Zaki Chehab, editor-in-chief of ArabsToday.net, the “largest Arabic-language news website” saw a silver lining in all this: we might now start talking again about more important things:
I met [former Palestinian leader Yassir] Arafat one month after 9/11 and it was the beginning of US putting him under siege. His words were exactly, ‘if it wasn’t for 9/11 we would be having a Palestinian state within to to three months…. Now there is no Bin Laden anymore we hope that Israel and Palestine returns to centre stage.
Dr Farzana Shaikh, associate fellow of the Asia Programme at Chatham House, was in doubt that the Pakistani political elite has lost some bargaining power through its failure to identify and capture bin Laden. “The most immediate impact with the loss of Osama bin Laden is that in the leadership and intelligence agencies have lost their leverage… and the idea that they were entitled to a seat at the top table. They are now in a much more vulnerable position.”
She continued on the theme of Pakistan’s alleged indifference towards radicalism – a criticism levelled at the state by many in the US:
[former Pakistan leader Pervez] Musharraf capitalised on the threat of terrorism to keep his rule intact… Pakistan’s problem is really the problem of the state’s ambivalence towards Islam. Islam and religion have been repeatedly used as means of propping up regimes. Pakistan has become much more vulnerable and environmentally friendly to different waves of radical Islam. This has been taken advantage of our military regimes which have nurtured a policy of militantism, which have used radicalism to pursue regional interests against India
Rosemary Hollis, professor of Middle East policy studies at City University, London, broached the tricky subject of whether the execution of bin Laden was legal. “They have killed thousands, hundreds of thouands, after 9/11. Was it legal? Probably not exactly,” she said.
“If you make might right, how can you preach rule of law to others? Of course it’s absurd to say ‘justice was done’. Obama’s a lawyer…but he was speaking as a politician, not as a lawyer.”
And turning to the issue at hand – is the world a safer place without bin Laden? – she offered a more sociological analysis: radicalisation inside Europe is caused by the treatment of Muslims in Europe and the amount of immigration, she argued, which is a far wider issue than, who are the bad guys and how do we get them.
“So I don’t think Osama bin Laden is responsible for all these sources of radicalisation.”
Hollis also made what was for me the point of the night – don’t think this superdsedes some of the genuinely era-defining democracy movements in the Arab world…
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