A New Crop of War Reporters

As the American war effort heats up, more journalists are pouring into central Asia every day. Still more are volunteering to go--in many cases, virtually begging to go--presenting editors across the country with increasingly difficult personnel decisions.

Mindful of the lure, the glory of The Big Story--and of the number of reporters who have been killed covering past wars--editors say they don’t want “cowboys” or big risk-takers. They want journalists who can operate in a volatile environment, reporters and photographers who can sense, for example, when a street demonstration is likely to turn violent.

“You want reporters who have experience in that part of the world, if possible, or experience in other dangerous situations, reporters who are resourceful and resilient and have stamina and high energy, who combine bravado and caution,” says Steven Butler, foreign editor for the Knight Ridder Washington bureau. “You have to get the story, but if you’re not careful you can get shot.”

Only a week old, the war in Afghanistan is already an enormously complex story. Access is limited. The enemy is shadowy, the information scarce, the environment inhospitable, the danger omnipresent.

“Reporters there are working in very difficult, remote terrain,” Butler says. “They don’t sleep on real beds, and they have to eat bad food and have to know how to operate under a lot of stress and danger, under very competitive situations.” Modern technology makes it possible to file stories and photos from distant, isolated locations, but that same technology imposes burdens. Reporters have to be able to recharge satellite phones and laptop computers on the run.

Mark Miller, chief of correspondents at Newsweek, says Owen Matthews, who’s been reporting from Afghanistan for almost three weeks, has had dysentery and Giardia (an intestinal illness) from “living basically on peanut butter and bad water.” Last Thursday, he came under fire 40 miles north of Kabul.

“Owen has reported for us from Bosnia and Chechnya, so we’re fairly confident that he can take care of himself,” Miller says, “but it’s very arduous, and that kind of experience is invaluable.”

Reporters from other news organization also have encountered hostile action. Robyn Dixon of the Los Angeles Times has been fired on twice--and robbed. Her colleague, John Daniszewski, was in a convoy of journalists being escorted by police from Quetta to the Pakistani border last week when they were set on and cut off by an angry, chanting mob of 1,000 to 2,000 men and boys.

Editors agree that experience living and working abroad, especially under combat conditions, is the primary prerequisite for going to central Asia on this story. Editors are giving preference to reporters who have covered the Persian Gulf War, the Balkans strife, the Latin-American conflicts of the 1980s or other hardship posts.

“Having lived several years in London or Paris, where you just check into a hotel and call the concierge or walk out onto the street to get what you need doesn’t necessarily mean you fit the profile of someone we’d want to send to Islamabad,” says Simon Li, foreign editor of The Times. “We want to be sure you can find food and housing and drivers and interpreters on your own and not get frustrated when the phones don’t work or transportation breaks down.”

Butler says one Knight Ridder editor, hearing about obstacles reporters were encountering, just shook his head and said, “I guess I’m just a hotel reporter.”

No American reporters have been known to resort to the tactics of Michel Peyrard, a reporter for the French weekly Paris Match, who was arrested last week after sneaking into Afghanistan disguised as a woman, but it’s clear that many reporters want very much to be part of this story. For all its risks and hardships, combat duty has historically given journalists, as well as soldiers, a shot of adrenaline--the opportunity to prove their mettle, make their careers and serve both their profession and their country.

At the San Jose Mercury News, “a lot of people raised their hands and wanted to go to Afghanistan,” says Dan Sneider, the paper’s national/foreign editor. “Many were longtime reporters who said, ‘I’ve covered earthquakes and fires. I can do it.”’ I appreciate anyone’s enthusiasm and willingness to go into a situation like this, but I was a foreign correspondent for more than 15 years, and my response is that working in the U.S. is not comparable to working in Pakistan or Uzbekistan or Afghanistan. Those are bad places to work your way up a learning curve.”

Sneider says Mark McDonald from the paper’s Hanoi bureau has had rocks thrown at him in an Afghan refugee camp one day, and on another, was abandoned on the Pakistan-Afghan border by the local facilitator he had hired.

“This is not a situation you face in San Jose,” Sneider says. “The things you have to do there are things you only learn from doing. These are not things you learn in journalism school.”

Andrew Maykuth has traveled in “all the hellholes,” says his boss, Paul Nussbaum, foreign editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer. “He’s been all over Africa and covered Latin America, and he could file a story off a dishwasher if he had to. When he got to Tajikistan, he bought a gas-powered generator that he can plug into the cigarette lighter in his rented Russian car, and this week he was in Afghanistan one night, sitting on the hood of the car, talking to me on a satellite phone and filing by laptop, and the Northern Alliance guys who were all around him were convinced he was actually calling in airstrikes.”

Buying a gas-powered generator--or anything else--isn’t easy. It takes contacts--often local fixers or facilitators recruited by reporters whose experience has taught them where and how to find them. But it also takes money--usually American dollars.

“There aren’t any banks or cash machines there,” says Howard Chua-Eoan, assistant managing editor of Time magazine, “so we’ve had to set up an intermittent money supply line. We make arrangements for a rendezvous by satellite phone and then fly someone into Tajikistan, and they drive into northern Afghanistan with the money. The whole thing can take four or five days.”

With Afghanistan’s notoriously harsh winter approaching, editors say they have to be sure the reporters they send are “especially physically fit,” in the words of Leonard Downie, executive editor of the Washington Post.

“So far, most people have only had to stay there a few weeks, and that’s tough enough, given the high altitude and everything else in Afghanistan,” Downie says, “but we’re about to have to send some new people in, and in the winter, entrances and exits will be very difficult, so they’ll have to be prepared to stay for up to a few months.”

Foreign language skills are also important, editors say, and while few American reporters speak any of the Afghani dialects, those who are proficient in Urdu, Arabic, Farsi and Russian have been assigned in growing numbers. The Boston Globe sent Arabic-speaking Anthony Shadid from Washington, D.C., to Cairo; The Times sent Farsi-speaking Soraya Sorhaddi Nelson from its metro staff to Tehran.

Many editors caution, however, against basing assignments exclusively on the special skills and experience deemed necessary for working in central Asia. Some of the abilities required to do well on this job are the same as those required on any important story.

“You want to send well-rounded people, versatile people who report aggressively, think clearly and write well and quickly,” says Martin Baron, editor of the Boston Globe, “reporters who are thorough and who have demonstrated in the past that they can perform well under all kinds of pressures.”

At least one editor, Brian Duffy of U.S. News & World Report, says he’s intentionally planning to send one reporter to central Asia whom “you would never think of as a combat correspondent.

“Jay Tolson, our cultural and ideas reporter, writes thoughtful essays,” among them the cover story on Islam he wrote in Washington last week, Duffy says. “He’s not an old newspaper guy. He came to us three years ago from Wilson Quarterly,” the journal of the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, where he spent 17 years.

Duffy has already dispatched Michael Schaffer to Islamabad, where the Urdu-speaking reporter lived for several years as a young man when his parents were posted there as diplomats. But Duffy thinks Tolson, a former literature and history teacher, can provide an extra dimension to the magazine’s coverage of the conflict.

“He’s interested in the Islamic world and the Islamic faith,” Duffy says. “As soon as we can figure out where to send him and not just have him sitting around waiting for things to happen, we’ll send him in.”