News organizations and journalists make their reputations by getting the story that is difficult to get, but are we now in an age where the only eyewitness to history may be the stray academic, researcher or human rights activist, rather than a journalist?
News organizations and journalists make their reputations by getting the story that is difficult to get, which brings glory to the journalist while burnishing the reputations of their news organizations.
But are we now in an age where the only eyewitness to history may be the stray academic, researcher or human rights activist, rather than a journalist? This debate began at the OPC panel discussion in April about new venture in foreign reporting.
Consider this dispatch: DATELINE: The Darfur Region of Sudan—Just before going underground, Janjaweed leader Musa Hilal went before the cameras telling about the Sudanese government aiding and abetting his militia’s genocidal campaign in the Darfur region of that country. Except the cameras before him belonged to no news organizations. And no news organization had the resources to speak with Hilal, then painstakingly translate the four-hour interview conducted in Sudanese Arabic. No, his interlocutors were researchers from Human Rights Watch.
“No one else had this interview,” Minky Worden, Media Director for Human Rights Watch, told me. “We have a ton of former career foreign correspondents working for us so the work that we’re doing is not only up to journalistic standards, but it’s actually a higher standard, particularly when we’re the only one on the scene.”
But, maybe, tactically, this argument shouldn’t be made to a roomful of hardened journalists, as Worden and her colleagues did at a recent OPC panel discussion on new ventures in foreign reporting.
HRW made the footage available to news organizations and the explosive charges from that interview reverberated around the world as it, for the first time, confirmed long-held suspicions and laid the responsibility for the ongoing atrocities squarely on the doorsteps of Omar Hassan al-Bashir, President of Sudan.
Worden and Emma Daly, HRW’s Director of Communications, advanced the argument that news organizations ought to byline their reportage as news pieces and journalists should fill in holes in the HRW staff pieces.
“Given what a hard time print outlets are having in covering things themselves, is there going to be a time in the near future where we at Human Rights Watch would be able to provide not just photos and videos but probably even text that is not just a press release but is actually the story?” asked Daly, a former foreign correspondent at The New York Times, among other places.
Charlie Sennott, executive editor of GlobalPost.com pointed out that he is forming partnerships with non-governmental organizations, including HRW, that employ former journalists. He vouched, for instance, for the work done by Marcus Bleasdale of the VII photo agency at a Somali refugee camp.
“Marcus is one of the greatest photographers in the world and Marcus is not going to be compromised in the way he shoots an image by doing it for Human Rights Watch. I mean it’s so integral with his body of work,” Sennot said. “There’s no conflict.”
But not every panelist was sold on this arrangement.
Richburg, Washington Post’s veteran foreign correspondent, said he would consign HRW’s output to the opinion pages.
“I would, as much as I admire your work, be uncomfortable taking your report from you,”
Rosenwasser said. “I think [HRW] is doing remarkably important work and, that said, the journalist’s role is to stand outside of that, to evaluate that information the same way that you would evaluate that information from IBM or the U.S. government.”
Some might find this argument to be a crock, of course, considering all the scandals that journalism has generated in recent years. My personal hero, John Burns, came under scrutiny for his reporting in Bosnia, which shared the 1993 Pulitzer for International Reporting. Burns would lose further shine for his more emotional reporting in Iraq.
As a proud former journalist who covered foreign news, I am not offended that HRW wants its work considered journalism. I believe the heavily footnoted, rigorously researched reports that they and the experts at other human rights organizations produce are exalted works that, while you would question it and tease out the stories in them, should not be dismissed as something lesser.
Of course, there would not even be a discussion if the entire media industry were not currently under siege. We live in an age when media companies—when they are not shutting down outright, or declaring bankruptcy—are laying off, furloughing and buying staffers out. And the ones that have foreign bureaus are busy cutting back and hustling out foreign correspondents with indiscriminate alacrity.
This retrenchment by leading news organizations from international news has left many prize-winning journalists unemployed. So Sennott steps in, offers penurious wages and hires foreign correspondents for the fledgling GlobalPost, which then gains instant credibility.
It’s hard out there for a foreign correspondent. But long after we journalists have shuffled off the scene, human rights workers continue laboring to make sure governments do not resume persecuting and killing their people. Why would human rights workers want to descend to our level of mere ink-stained wretches?
The work human rights officials do, however admirable, is not news. They have to continue doing their work and now more than ever the world needs more—not fewer —journalists to shine lights on forsaken outposts. Our age needs its Gutmans, Hershes, Salisburys, and countless others to shine a light in the darkest corners and deepen our knowledge of the world.
Michael O. Allen, a former journalist, now runs his website: michaeloallen.com.