Since you did this for your job, any opinions on this tweet by catturd?
Thanks for asking Bernie. It’s a bit of a complicated story but let me try a brief summary.
1. There are always far fewer American reporters in a war zone when American boots are not on the ground. When things were really dangerous in Mogadishu before the Marines and later the Army troops arrived, I was one of a small handful of Americans there. Dozens flooded in with the troops. There was ferocious fighting in central Bosnia in 92-93 when I was there. That’s maybe the closest comparison to Ukraine, though not that close. Few American journalists were there -lots of Brits and Europeans.
When Catturd cites reporters embedded with troops he seems to mean AMERICAN troops, of which there are none in Ukraine. Not too many reporters spent more than a short time traveling with Bosnian irregulars or Northern Alliance troops in Afghanistan or Tutsi army units in Rwanda. And the rules have changed in the days of instant digital reporting. Think about it —what do modern journalists need to do their job? A satellite footprint. No Ukrainian unit in artillery range wants that.
2. The financial realities of journalism have changed in ways that make covering war zones the option of very few organizations. When I represented big newspaper chains like Hearst (huge papers in SF, Seattle, Houston, San Antonio, Albany, etc., all making money) most large and mid-sized organizations could afford it. But profits fell dramatically post-internet and costs rose until it became impossible for all but a handful of organizations. There were several THOUSAND reporters in the Gulf during Desert Storm —most of whom never made it to the combat zone (I was there very early, spent months getting connected, got out with the Big Red One in early January and spent the war out ahead of VII Corps with a Bradley Scout squadron that saw lots of action.)
3. It got a lot more dangerous. Access in Vietnam was total for reporters and they swarmed the place. Even so, relatively few were killed, at least until near the end in Cambodia. But fluid, no frontlines wars were much more deadly for reporters, especially as 24-hour news cycles made it necessary to get very close to the action. Highway ambushes killed lots of journalists, as did friendly fire in places like Iraq. The count of people I worked with in combat zones and in some cases were friends with who were killed was at 28 when I quit counting -I lost friends and colleagues in Somalia, Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Chechnya, Kosovo, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq -almost always traveling apart from the military. My closest calls were road ambushes in Bosnia and Afghanistan before there were any organized armies around -just killers. Four European journalists were killed in the Afghanistan ambush I escaped.
One consequence -insurance got so expensive on journalists only the very biggest organizations that could self-insure could tell staffers ‘well take care of your family with $1 million (minimum) if something happens.’
4. Finally, for anyone who has read this far —there IS some detailed and relatively astute reporting going on from Ukraine, some of it quite remarkable. BUT -a lot of it is either being done by Europeans and most Americans never see it. Or it is being done by left wing news outlets like the New York Times that many people correctly dismiss as biased so they don’t see their coverage.
I don’t like the Times on politics, culture or social issues. But they have had probably the best war coverage —although not right in the front lines for reasons I have cited. Organizations take a multi-million dollar hit when a news team gets killed. I’ve got a very close friend who was a producer for CBS in Iraq who was badly injured in an IED explosion that killed some Marines. He’s still racking up medical bills 17 years later CBS is paying. Had he been killed, his wife would have gotten a seven-figure pay-out and his family probably would have sued for more.
That may seem an extremely long-winded response but believe me, that’s a brief summary. It’s complicated.
