Project: Monitoring Serbia’s OSCE Chairmanship16Aug2015
How Some Organizations Are Trying To Keep Journalists Out Of The Crosshairs
Those in power have realized that killing journalists is a surefire way to grab headlines.
Attacks on media personnel is an increasingly common way “to send a message to the journalistic community and the broader public about where the red lines are and to really repress and suppress any sort of independent reporting or analytical commentary,” Courtney Radsch of the Committee to Protect Journalists CPJ said in an interview.
From the gruesome beheadings of journalists in Syria to the targeted killings of reporters for the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, attacks on media have become increasingly common.
Ninety-two journalists and media associates were killed last year, 61 of them because of the work they did, according to a tally by the Committee to Protect Journalists. This year is on track to be another extremely deadly one for journalists with 50 killings reported so far.
Given the dangers, both media outlets and nonprofit organizations are adopting new methods to ensure that journalists continue to report stories — not become them.
One of them is a new app called Salama, which helps journalists specifically assess the risks they’ll face on certain assignments. Developed by Jorge Luis Sierra, a journalist with 30 years of experience reporting from some of the most dangerous countries in the world, the app is a way to formalize conversations that journalists might have before they venture out to conflict zones or begin to cover of controversial issues.
Unlike corporations or governments, Sierra told ThinkProgress, “It is not a common practice for a journalist to assess risk before doing a dangerous job.”
He said that if a reporter was going to cover, for example, the ongoing conflict in Iraq, she might contact a reporter who had worked there and ask for suggestions on people to work with on the ground or which hotels might be the safest.
While useful, those conversations provide insight that might not be equally applicable to any given reporter.
Through the app, Sierra hopes to take the guesswork out of such decisions by formally assessing risk based on several different metrics including individual reporters’ beats, media organizations, familiarity with cybersecurity, and, crucially, the specific areas to which they plan on travelling.
“It can be kind of a companion to reporters whenever they are going to cover something risky,” he said.
After filling out a series of tailored questions, the reporters will be told if the story they wish to undertake is low, medium, or high risk.
Since the security situation is constantly evolving and territory is shifting hands in countries like Iraq, a town that was safe for a reporter to visit even a month ago might not be safe in a month’s time. While the app doesn’t yet have that map-based information for each country, it’s something Sierra is working on developing.
The Rory Peck Trust, a London-based nonprofit organization, works on providing similar information to freelance journalists who might not have the institutional support to get a clear sense of the dangers they face.
Along with the Committee to Protect Journalists, it launched a tool to specifically address the needs of local Syrian journalists earlier this month,. The Syrian Media Safety Resource offers information on key ways for journalists to ensure their safety, as well as risk assessment tools and a form through which they can appeal for emergency assistance.
“Journalists can become complacent and think they know a place so well,” Sarah Giaziri of the Rory Peck Trust said in an interview.
That sense of familiarity might keep journalists have having a true sense of the risks they face, an issue which is compounded by the fact that so many of them only began to report after the Syrian civil war began in 2010.
“A lot of Syrian journalists that we’re in touch with haven’t had any sort of training,” she said.
While they might have developed their own ways to survey the environment for particularly dangerous areas, Giaziri said that many overlook more basic methods of staying safe. Establishing a communication plan in case of an emergency is one example.
Without a plan to call someone at regular intervals while in especially dangerous environments, she said that journalists “can fall into a black hole where no one is even aware that’s something’s happened until it’s too late to do anything effective to help find them.”
In order to try to prevent the fate that freelancers like James Foley and Steven Sotloff faced when they were abducted and later beheaded by the so-called Islamic State militant group, dozens of media outlets have signed on to a historic agreement promising to establish security plans with those who report for them.
Since freelance journalists often lack formal training, they tend to be more likely to neglect is the importance of cybersecurity and encryption. That oversight has led to many journalists being tracked by the Syrian regime or militant groups through their social media profiles and physically threatened or attacked, according to Giaziri.
One issue particular to Syrian journalists — who make up the vast majority of those reporting from the country that has spun into chaos — is the psychological toll of reporting on a conflict in their home country. Without even realizing they’ve been negatively affected, Giaziri said, Syrian journalists might face high levels of depression or anxiety that can impair their judgement and put them at additional risk.
Mowaffaq Safidi, a Syrian journalist, recently wrote about this phenomenon in the Guardian:
"Being a Syrian journalist is just like being a journalist of any nationality, except that it is your revolution that you helped to report on that has turned into the vicious killing machine it is today. It is your hometown that you are reporting on being bombed off the face of the Earth. It is your actual family that is either scattered, killed or worse, waiting to be killed. It will be you who reports all of this only to see it turned into numbers on news bulletins. And all the while you’re also a civilian living in the middle of a civil war, where people have been reduced to creatures seeking survival."
While Syria continues to be the most dangerous country in the world for journalists, attacks on journalists are not limited to war zones. The ISIS-inspired attack on the headquarters of Charlie Hebdo is evidence of that, as are the execution-stylekillings of two journalists in Mexico earlier this month.
One key indicator of the specific threats journalists may face comes from assessing the issues they cover. Journalists who report on politics have topped the list of those attacked around the world.
Courtney Radsch of the Committee to Protect Journalists attributes that surprising finding to a shift in power dynamics that have left journalists vulnerable to attack.
“It used to be that journalists had this privileged role where they were seen as interlocutors between those in power and the general public,” she said. “Now those in power…can bypass journalists and go directly to the public through social media and the internet.”
Increased access to platforms to disseminate information, she added, has made it so government officials, militant organizations, and drug cartels can put out news for themselves, without having to rely on journalists to carry their stories.
“There’s no longer this interest in having independent reporting and objective analysis in a lot of these conflict situations or even on domestic affairs in countries where governments have little interest in being held accountable,” Radsch said.
Once the reserve of only traditional media outlets, opening up the journalistic playing field has made journalists the target of more attacks. And that, in turn, has made objective information and critical analysis of many of the world’s most powerful — and violent — organizations harder to come by.
If a journalist stumbles onto damning insight and is then brutally murdered, Radsch said, who’s going to do anything about it?
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