Why do you think it is that you know anything at all about ISIS? Or al-Qaeda? Or the war in Syria, the war in Libya, the war in Yemen, the war in Gaza, the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, the war in Ukraine?
Journalists, that’s why.
Journalists, of course, aren’t the only ones whose lives are on the line in wars. There are professional soldiers and homegrown militias, aid workers and medical personnel, and civilians caught in the line of fire. But the people day in and day out who are risking their lives to tell you what’s going on in the big bad world out there are the journalists.
I worked wars for a long time, dodging everything from artillery to bullets to machetes. In one particularly bad year, I made it through but lost three journalist friends to warfare: in Nicaragua, in Lebanon and in Iran, where a reporter from the Los Angeles Times was shot to death right next to me.
Last year was awfully bad for journalists in general: The Committee to Protect Journalists counts 61 killed in the line of duty. Most died in the middle of wars.
That’s what makes one small part of a very long report issued by the Pentagon earlier this summer, the “Department of Defense Law Of War Manual,” so dangerous. Most of the directives in the manual are necessary and constructive, calling for “self-control … under the stresses of combat,” and “prohibitions on torture and unnecessary destruction.” They are about a soldier’s duties and a soldier’s rights.
But then there’s the part about journalists. It uses language meant to describe the role journalists play and define the risks journalists face. But it ends up giving authoritarian leaders — which certainly includes any of our enemies today, whether sovereign governments or not — a ready-to-use set of charges against any journalist they don’t like. In many parts of the world, that means all of them.
One example from the manual: “In some cases, the relaying of information (such as providing information of immediate use in combat operations) could constitute taking a direct part in hostilities.” Another: “Civilian journalists who engage in hostilities against a State may be punished by that State after a fair trial.” And the worst: “Reporting on military operations can be very similar to collecting intelligence or even spying.”
Imagine those phrases in the hands of our enemies when they have a journalist in their sights.
In many nations around the world, journalists actually work for their governments and are obliged to “collect intelligence,” some because if they don’t, they simply don’t work, some because that’s who actually signs their paychecks. What this leads to in those places is an automatic assumption that every journalist from around the world is really just working for his or her government, an automatic suspicion that Western journalists, like their own, are no more than spies themselves.
In my own experience, I’ve had to fight that perception. When American diplomats in different war zones approached journalists like me asking for information about what was happening “out on the streets,” they were putting us at risk of being suspected of, and charged with, espionage, even by the mere fact that we might be seen talking with them. That’s what makes the language in this new Defense Department manual so frightening.
With last year’s barbarous beheadings of journalists by ISIS, reliable news coverage from that part of the world already has been drastically diminished. If the Pentagon believes in the value of information it can’t collect itself, not to mention the right of all Americans to a free flow of information, it should erase what it wrote.
Greg Dobbs of Evergreen was a correspondent for ABC News for 23 years, then for HDNet television’s “World Report.”
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