Page 238 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

Journal sts n Per l | 1

1945. Covering the Vietnam War was also dangerous; the Freedom Forum lists
63 journalists who lost their lives there.
Modern insurgent movements create a particularly dangerous atmosphere
for the journalists who try to cover the countries in which they operate. Con-
sider the case of American Daniel Pearl, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal.
Starting in October 2000, Pearl served as the South Asia bureau chief for the
paper, based in Bombay, India. After the September 11th attacks, he frequently
traveled to Pakistan on reporting trips. On one of those trips, Pearl asked his
contacts to arrange a meeting with a leader of an insurgent group. Instead, on
January 23, 2002, Pearl was kidnapped. Pearl’s religion—Jewish—was one of the
factors in his kidnapping and murder. Although the kidnappers sent a list of de-
mands, which included the release of all Pakistani prisoners from U.S. custody,
there were no negotiations. Pearl was beheaded by his kidnappers, four of whom
were later caught and brought to justice. A major Hollywood movie made about
Pearl’s murder has brought worldwide attention to his case—and to the perils
faced by reporters trying to cover modern terrorism.
The single most dangerous place for journalists to work since 2003 has been
Iraq. The American-led war that overthrew Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein led to
an upsurge in ethnic violence. More journalists have now died in Iraq since 2003
than died covering World War II or the Vietnam conflict.
Foreign reporters, included several Americans, have been killed in Iraq. This
loss of life in Iraq began during the invasion itself, in March 2003. The award-
winning writer Michael Kelly, editor of the Atlantic Monthly and a columnist
for the Washington Post, was the first American journalist to die during the Iraq
war. While embedded with U.S. troops, Kelly was killed when the Hummer in
which he was riding went off the road into a canal to try to avoid enemy fire. In
one of the most controversial incidents, one Ukrainian and one Spanish televi-
sion cameraman were killed on April 8, 2003, when a U.S. tank fired directly
into Baghdad’s Palestine Hotel, where most of the foreign press corps was living
during the invasion. The U.S. military was roundly criticized after that incident
because it had been informed that journalists were staying in that particular
hotel. Reporters also refuted U.S. claims that troops were being fired upon when
they attacked the hotel. Later a tank commander said the camera lenses had
been mistaken for binoculars used to spot targets.
That same day, Tareq Ayoub, a correspondent for the Arabic news channel
Al-Jazeera was killed when U.S. forces fired a missile into the station’s Bagh-
dad office. Al-Jazeera, based in Qatar, had been highly critical of the Bush
administration—and said that it had specifically alerted the Pentagon to the
location of its Baghdad office so that its journalists would not be attacked. The
U.S. military never said whether the missile attack on Al-Jazeera was intentional
or accidental—but the incident, like the Palestine Hotel attack, was decried all
over the world. In a letter to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the Com-
mittee to Protect Journalists wrote that, given the protection journalists receive
under the laws of war, “these attacks violate the Geneva Conventions.” Other
international journalists and press freedom organizations also condemned the