Page 239 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

1 | Journal sts n Per l

U.S. attacks. Reporters Without Borders declared, “We can only conclude that
the U.S. Army deliberately and without warning targeted journalists.”
The vast majority of the journalists who have died in Iraq have been Iraqis.
About a third of them have been killed in bomb or mortar attacks, simply due to
being in the wrong place at the wrong time, according to CPJ. The organization
estimates that about two-thirds of those who have died have been the victims
of revenge killings, in incidents tied specifically to their work. A wide range of
Iraqi media outlets, and of foreign media with Iraqi employees, have been af-
fected. Among the worst hit have been state-owned media like the television
station Al-Iraqiya and the newspaper Al-Sabah, because of their ties to the U.S.-
supported Iraqi government. Those two media outlets have been particularly
hard hit by insurgents: on a regular basis their reporters have been murdered
and their offices have been attacked.
A typical case of an Iraqi journalist targeted for his work is So’oud Muza-
him al-Shoumari, a correspondent for the satellite channel Al-Baghdadia. Al-
Shoumai, who did on-camera reporting and anchored a news program, was
found shot in Baghdad on April 4, 2006. Al-Shoumari had regularly confronted
Iraqi police about suspicions that they were committing extrajudicial killings.
He regularly interviewed authorities about human rights violations and the
daily suffering of the Iraqi people. These kinds of revenge attacks are sometimes
related to the reporters’ ethnicity, either the majority Shiite or minority Sunni
branches of Islam. In the case of al-Shoumari, who was a Sunni, his colleagues
suspect it was members of a Shiite militia who killed him.

ThE PLusEs anD minusEs oF EmBEDs
The streets of Iraq, and to some degree Afghanistan, are now so dangerous
that foreign journalists can barely travel and find it difficult to work. “It’s hard
to imagine anywhere more difficult,” says Alastair Macdonald, Baghdad bureau
chief for the Reuters news agency. “I don’t wake up every morning sweating
about the risks I’m taking, but I do know that if I walk 100 yards to the edge
of our secure area and out on the streets I’d be taking a major, almost suicidal,
risk.”
In order to get out of their hotels and to cover the work of troops first-hand,
reporters can be “embedded” with the American military, or with other coali-
tion forces. During an “embed,” journalists are assigned to a military unit and go
out into the field along with it. The good thing about these “embeds” is that they
give reporters the chance to get onto the front lines with the troops and to see
things they would not see otherwise. The bad thing is that journalists increase
their already high level of risk by being embeds, because the soldiers and their
convoys are constantly coming under attack.
Although the vast majority of victims of violence in Iraq were not embedded
when they died, several of the Westerners killed or seriously injured in Iraq sus-
tained their injuries while they were embedded. On May 29, 2006, CBS camera-
man Paul Douglas and soundman James Brolin were killed when, on an embed,
they got out of their car to inspect a checkpoint. On January 29, 2006, ABC