Reporter’s Death Highlights Increased Risks of Covering War

The slaying of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter kidnapped in Pakistan last month, is grim evidence of the growing danger to journalists covering modern warfare and civil unrest abroad.

“Conflicts have changed, and the way journalists cover them has changed,” says Ann Cooper, executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. “You go back to World War II and even Vietnam, and journalists were usually traveling with the U.S. military. That put them in great danger when there was a battle, but they weren’t crossing the front lines and interviewing the [Nazis] and the Viet Cong.

“Nowadays, in wars and in covering civil conflicts, journalists are trying to get both sides of the story, and they may travel on both sides of the front lines, and sometimes the U.S. military isn’t even there.”

Moreover, Cooper and others say, today’s front lines are often less clear, and today’s enemy often less easily identifiable, than in past wars.

Pearl’s killers appear to have been part of a still not fully identified Pakistani splinter group that lured him into a trap and kidnapped him in the Pakistani port city of Karachi. Pearl had gone to Karachi to investigate possible links between a Pakistani Islamic militant leader, Sheik Mubarak Ali Shah Gilani, and Richard C. Reid, a British national accused of trying to blow up a transatlantic airliner in December by detonating explosives hidden in his shoes.

In an e-mail to Western news organizations shortly after the kidnapping, Pearl’s abductors called themselves the National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty, a group then unknown to American officials. It’s the existence of precisely that kind of shadowy, fragmented enemy force that has increased the risk for journalists. Indeed, there are often several such forces in one country or even in a particular area of one country--opposing factions that are fighting the government or each other.

Modern technology has exacerbated the risks of combat coverage. Journalists now have satellite phones and videophones and laptop computers and small cameras, and they can get closer to the action than ever before. They can also file stories directly from remote locations, without having to return to the relative safety of a city to find a telephone or a telegraph office.

“The imperative of the job means if you can do it, you’re going to do it--get into the area where the combat is,” says Steven Livingston, a political scientist in the school of media and public affairs at George Washington University in Washington. “Competition encourages risk-taking, and modern technology facilitates risk-taking.”

Modern technology also makes it possible for more news organizations--even those without vast resources--to send reporters, photographers, producers and camera crews to a war zone. As Cooper says, “The more journalists you have there, the more journalists you have at risk.”

At the same time--and unlike in earlier wars in which they were largely accidental victims--journalists are increasingly targeted specifically because they’re journalists.

Sometimes they’re targeted because the enemy thinks that they’re high-visibility, negotiable commodities, as appears to have been the case with Pearl. Sometimes it’s in reprisal for what they’ve written or for what their government has done. Sometimes it’s simply because journalists in foreign countries are known to carry significant amounts of cash and to have expensive equipment that can be sold or bartered.

Pearl was the ninth Western journalist killed since the war in Afghanistan began. The others were Ulf Stromberg of TV4 in Sweden, Johanne Sutton of Radio France Internationale, Pierre Billaud of Radio Television Luxembourg, freelance reporter Volker Handloik, Julio Fuentes of El Mundo in Spain, Maria Grazia Cutuli of the Corriere della Sera newspaper in Italy, and Azizullah Haidari and Harry Burton, both of Reuters.

More than a dozen others have been robbed, arrested, kidnapped or shot at, and before the collapse of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, reports were widespread that Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders had offered a bounty of $50,000 to $100,000 to anyone who killed a foreign journalist.

Pearl’s killing was similar to that of George Polk, the CBS correspondent who disappeared May 8, 1948, during the Greek civil war while working on a story about a Greek government minister--and while trying to arrange an interview with a communist guerrilla leader. Polk’s body was found a week later in Salonica Bay.

The George Polk Awards, given annually in his honor, were created the next year by Long Island University.

Pearl’s slaying, which was apparently videotaped by his killers, also has grisly similarities to the notorious killing of another American journalist, ABC television reporter Bill Stewart. In 1979, a Nicaraguan National Guardsman put a bullet in Stewart’s head at point-blank range as Stewart knelt in front of him, with ABC cameras rolling all the while.

The video was later shown on the major U.S. television networks.

The targeting of journalists accelerated somewhat in the 1980s and considerably in the ‘90s.

Three journalists were kidnapped during the Lebanese civil war, and one--Terry Anderson of Associated Press--was held hostage from 1985 to 1991. None was killed.

But in several more recent wars, journalists have been targeted for death, and kidnappings have become “a pretty regular hazard for journalists in [the Russian republic of] Chechnya,” Cooper says.

Cooper says Pearl’s case is the first she knows of since Polk in which a U.S. journalist was kidnapped, “apparently for political ends,” and then murdered. But she says that in recent years, an unknown number of local journalists have been assassinated in Argentina, Algeria and Sierra Leone, usually “in reprisal for their writing.” Her organization has also documented numerous kidnappings of journalists during the drug wars and related conflicts in Colombia, and at least one of these resulted in death.

More than 1,400 journalists have been killed on the job since 1812, according to the Freedom Forum, which has erected a 37-foot-high glass-and-steel monument to them in Freedom Park in Arlington, Va. One of these casualties was Mark Kellogg, a freelance newspaper reporter who accompanied Gen. George Armstrong Custer and the 7th Cavalry to the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876 and wound up the only civilian casualty in that massacre.

More than 700 of the journalists died covering wars--66 in World War II, 65 in Vietnam.

Four Los Angeles Times reporters have been killed in the line of duty--three overseas, one in Los Angeles.

Between 1992 and 2001, 399 journalist were killed “because of their work,” according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

The committee also says 118 journalists were in prison at the end of 2001, up from 81 the previous year, and there is little doubt that war, civil unrest, rampant crime and repressive regimes in several countries have made the practice of journalism abroad more dangerous than ever.