‘You’ve got to wonder if it’s worth it’

Every year it is the same at the Royal Television Society’s journalism awards. Before the backslapping can begin, there is a moment of reflection. The hacks stand in silence, while the names of journalists who have been killed over the past year doing their job are projected onto a large screen. Every year the same? Not this time. At last month’s ceremony, the names just kept on coming. It felt like an age for the 138 names to roll past.

A report this month from the International News Safety Institute confirmed that the death toll in 2006 was the worst on record. And no one will have been surprised to learn the name of the country with the grimmest news for journalists.

This month marks the fourth anniversary of the start of the Iraq war. During those years, the landscape for reporters on the ground has changed beyond recognition. You may recall the phrase that was tacked on to the end of every TV correspondent’s­ package from Baghdad when Saddam Hussein’s despotic regime was at its most powerful: ‘This report was compiled under Iraq’s reporting restrictions.” Today, there are, of course, no government­-imposed restrictions (there is not much of a government to speak of). But the limits on what journalists can do, see and say are unimaginably greater than they were in the 1990s.

‘It’s so different, it’s like visiting a different country in a different era. There’s not the faintest similarity,” says the BBC’s John Simpson.

‘Under Saddam, you were followed around and reported on — and you knew that — but you could walk anywhere at any time of night. Now, the danger of kidnap, a bullet or a roadside bomb so restricts the ability­ to find out what’s happening that you’ve got to wonder sometimes if it’s worth it.” There was a brief moment, in the aftermath of Saddam’s fall, when, in Simpson’s words, ‘I thought it was going to be Paris in 1944.”

Tim Marshall, foreign affairs editor of Sky News, recalls: ‘When the statue came down, I was in Iraq, driving up from the south. For the first time in 20 years you could move around, do what you want, speak to who you want. It was so amazing not to have one of Saddam’s goons accompanying you everywhere.”

Martin Fletcher of the London Times recalls evenings out at restaurants and parties in the palatial, marble­-floored ‘mini-palace” that served as his paper’s Baghdad bureau.

But the writing was already on the wall. Within a few days of Saddam’s ousting, a man was shot. ‘We thought very little of it at the time — just one of those things,” says Marshall. ‘Nobody realised then that they had planned for an insurgency all along. They’d got everything ready for this moment.”

Marshall is back in Baghdad. A few days ago, he went out there to put together packages for a special ‘Iraq week” that runs until Friday. There are no marble floors in Sky’s makeshift bureau. He and his team are based in a former family home surrounded by high walls and barbed wire. At the end of the street is a government checkpoint. Outside the front door stands an armed guard. Behind it, a vicious dog.

‘We’re surrounded on three sides by bullet-proof metal,” Marshall explains. But TV needs its pictures. On one side, the metal is absent to provide a backdrop of the city behind Marshall and the other Sky News correspondents during their two-way interviews with London. ‘We will be going live from the rooftop. Obviously you get a little bit more nervous at night when you’ve got a big light on you,” says Marshall.

Ask any journalist who reports from Baghdad and within a few sentences you will hear about their ’10-minute rule”, except that the bravest or most foolhardy call it the ’20-minute rule”.

It is very simple. To interview real Iraqis on the street, you drive up fast, jump out quickly, grab what you can — then speed off again.

Simpson explains: ‘You’ve got to have some sort of rule. We reckon that 15 or 20 minutes is about the time it would take somebody to make a cellphone call saying: ‘There’s a group of Westerners filming here. Get round here with a gun and a couple of guys and we’ll sort them out.’” The terms of engagement are no different for print journalists.

Robert Fisk of the London Independent used to make regular trips to a Baghdad mortuary to count the bodies. Soon, the gunmen showed up there too — to kill the grieving Iraqis who had come to pick up their dead relatives. Now Fisk allows himself ‘hardly enough time to count the dead” before making his escape.

Many journalists decide it is not safe enough even to grab a few minutes on the street. Harriet Sherwood, foreign editor of The Guardian, says ‘a lot of news organisations are not terribly honest about what it is possible to do in Iraq. We’ve just had a correspondent in Baghdad and he couldn’t leave his hotel. He’s a very experienced reporter, but this is the first time he’d been in Baghdad where he just felt it was impossible to go anywhere.”

Sherwood has absolutely no criticism of a reporter who decides it is too dangerous to venture out. A year and a half ago, Shia gunmen kidnapped her correspondent Rory Carroll and held him for 36 hours.

Immediately afterwards, The Guardian closed its full-time Baghdad bureau. Today, of the British media, only the BBC and the Times keep a permanent presence in Iraq — and the Times has just lost its two key Iraq reporters (though happily to new jobs on American newspapers rather than anything more sinister). No news organisation will now send a correspondent to Iraq who has not been there before. And, unsurprisingly, there are fewer and fewer journalists willing to travel to the country.

For those who do go, there are two possible solutions to the dangers, and neither is very satisfactory: either embed with the American or British military, or use Iraqi journalists and fixers as your eyes and ears.

Consequently, a lot of fact finding­ is now done on the telephone from hotelrooms — something Fisk regrets. ‘The problem with cellphone hotel journalism is that you could pretty much do that from County Mayo or Gloucestershire. You don’t need to go to Baghdad for that, do you?” As a result, it is virtually impossible to get under the skin of the story, to tell the human side of the events that are tearing the nation apart.

As Fisk says: ‘The tragedy for journalism is that you can’t keep up the power of your writing if you don’t have the freedom to see what you are writing about.”

Thus today’s roadside suicide attack appears on the surface much like yesterday’s — and it is likely to attract fewer column inches and television minutes.

There is a tasteless phrase that used to be heard in TV newsrooms: ‘If it bleeds, it leads.” It no longer holds true, because news means telling­ people about new things. Forgive the pun, but a report about suicide bombing in Iraq is a statement of the bleeding obvious.

Sherwood says: ‘I’m very conscious of the fact that there is a fatigue level settling in on Iraq deaths. They certainly get less coverage than they did.”

Few doubt that the battle will only get more difficult. Sherwood adds: ‘The story of what’s happening in Iraq is the most important one of our time, but I don’t think it’s worth getting reporters killed for.” —