CIAO DATE: 7/99

Journalists Covering Conflict: Norms of Conduct

April 28, 1999

Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict

Introduction

The School of International Public Affairs and the School of Journalism at Columbia University, the Center for War, Peace, and the News Media at New York University; and the Carngie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict present Journalists Covering Conflict: Norms of Conduct.

In the wake of the tragedies in Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina, journalists and media analysts increasingly question the ethical and moral responsibilities associated with covering conflict. This symposium brought together professionals from the international news media, academia, and the analytic community to discuss how norms and training can contribute to more effective news coverage of conflict situations.

Rapporteur's Report

Rapporteur: Alexandre Tiersky, Center for War, Peace, and the News Media

1. Rapporteur's Introduction
    
2. Summaries of the Presentations and Discussions
   • Welcome by Jane Holl, Executive Director, Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict
   • Introduction by Leslie Gelb, President, Council on Foreign Relations
      
3. Session One: Ethical Issues in Conflict Coverage
   • Chaired by Donald Johnston, Director, Program in International Media and Communications, School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University
   • Bill Blakemore, Correspondent, ABC News
   • Michael Ignatieff, Author, The Warrior's Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience and Blood and Belonging
   • Ed Vulliamy, International Reporter, The Guardian and Bureau Chief and Correspondent, Observer
   • Gadi Wolfsfeld, Senior Fellow, U.S. Institute of Peace, and Chair, Department of Communication, Hebrew University
   • Discussion and questions led by Bernard Kalb, Journalist, author and co-host, "Reliable Sources," CNN
      
4. Session Two: Training Journalists
   • Chaired by Anne Nelson, Director, International Programs, Columbia School of Journalism
   • Seymour Topping, Sanpaolo Professor of International Journalism and Administrator of The Pulitzer Prizes, Columbia School of Journalism
   • Edward Girardet, Editor, Crosslines Global Report and President, International Centre for Humanitarian Reporting
   • Kemal Kurspahic, Editor, Connection Newspapers and Former Editor-in-Chief, Oslobejenje
   • Roy Gutman, Diplomatic Correspondent, Newsday
   • Discussion and questions led by Tim Carrington, Manager of Economics Journalism Training, World Bank Institute
      
5. Session Three: Norms of Conduct
   • Chaired by Jane Holl, Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict
   • Tom Gjelten, Diplomatic Correspondent, National Public Radio
   • Robert Manoff, Director, Center for War, Peace, and the News Media, New York University, and Chairman, National Press Institute (of the Russian Federation)
   • Dapo Olorunyomi, Senior Fellow and Director, Nigeria Programs, Panos Institute
   • Discussion and questions led by Jay Rosen, Professor, Department of Journalism, New York University
      

 

Rapporteur's Introduction

As NATO's bombing of Serbia continued into its 6^th week, 17 media specialist from around the world gathered to address the topic of "Journalists Covering Conflict: Norms Of Conduct" at Columbia University for a symposium organized by the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict and co-sponsored by the School of International and Public Affairs of Columbia University, the School of Journalism of Columbia University, and the Center for War, Peace, and the News Media at New York University. The symposium took place on April 28, 1999.

Three panels offered fascinating discussion as well as lively debate to the 75-100 experts, professionals, and students who attended the conference.

Covering conflict forces journalists to face a wide array of troubling ethical dilemmas as to their role, function, methods, and conduct. The symposium's goal was to generate an open discussion regarding these dilemmas and how to help journalists confront them in the hope that the discussion would yield some insight into how norms and training can contribute to more effective news coverage of conflict situations.

Interestingly, the timing of the symposium was such that it looked at ethical issues in conflict coverage at a time in which several of the discussants were actively involved in reporting on a war. In fact, many of the presenters had only very recently returned from the Balkans. Accordingly, presentations and the questions that followed often were brought into sharp relief by reference to current events such as the bombing of Serbian television facilities by NATO forces.

Some of the speakers—from Bosnian Newspaperman and Independent Media leader Kemal Kurspahic to the journalists who first came across the Bosnian death camps, Ed Vulliamy and Roy Gutman—had a special interest and experience in covering the Balkan conflict. Others shared wisdom gleaned from covering other conflicts around the world: from Nigerian Editor Dapo Olorunyomi, whose newspaper helped topple a dictatorship, to Gadi Wolfsfeld's analyses of the media's role in the Middle East and Northern Irish peace processes, to Bill Blakemore's analysis of the coverage of the Gulf War, this rich and diverse pool of individuals produced a broad and illuminating picture of the current state of conflict coverage.

Several presenters shared the moral guidelines they had prepared for themselves as journalists in order to better face the difficult ethical issues that are inherent in war reporting: Blakemore presented a list of do's and don'ts that originated during his time as an ABC correspondent during the Gulf War. Michael Ignatieff offered his own set of injunctions for covering conflict, while Anne Nelson proposed a list of what courses might best prepare journalists going to cover a war. These propositions included the need for accuracy, fairness, loyalty to one's own moral compass, a familiarity with the area which one is covering, including some linguistic proficiency, and a healthy dose of skepticism, among others.

Others (Mr. Kurspahic and Mr. Gelb among them) felt that journalists did not need special training or norms to cover conflict; that sticking to the basic values of journalism would allow them to do their job competently. But what those basic values were or should be was not clear. Mr. Manoff and Mr. Olorunyomi argued that even such basic tenets as objectivity were relatively young Anglo-Saxon constructs, and that a more global, indeed universal approach to norms should be undertaken. Similarly, Edward Girardet expressed his frustration at the difficulty of finding standards in the U.S. media to hold up to the journalists he was training in Albania; he also found, however, that certain 'fundamentals'—skepticism vis-à-vis a source, doing the 'legwork' were, after all, the key elements of training journalists.

Still, these proposals failed to adequately resolve one of the main themes of the symposium, as presented by the gripping ethical dilemmas faced by Ed Vulliamy and Roy Gutman: can a journalist remain neutral in the face of hideous criminal behavior? Can reporters stay neutral when that neutrality becomes complicity in the crime? Furthermore, if journalists report the facts on something as hideous as a death camp and those facts fail to stir up a response from governments, do journalists have the right to become 'advocates'?

The speakers fell on both sides of this question, with Seymour Topping adamantly calling for 'veering away from advocacy reporting,' while Mr. Vulliamy 'tossed [his] neutrality out the window long ago.'

What was most evident throughout the symposium was the reluctance of journalists such as Roy Gutman and Tom Gjelten to subscribe to specific types of training or norms, for fear of tying down the profession to ideals that it could not or would not want to fulfill. Although most panelists at least seemed to agree that 'guidelines' (in the words of Mr. Gelb), 'injunctions' (Ignatieff), or 'rules' (Blakemore) might be helpful in resolving particular ethical problems, the more difficult and larger questions of neutrality, objectivity, and 'advocacy reporting' raised by Vulliamy and others remain outside the scope of such propositions.

The panelists all seemed to agree on one proposition: that these questions will only become more important as well as more complicated, and that more scrutiny should be brought to bear on them.

 

Conference Summary

Welcoming Remarks

Jane Holl
Executive Director, Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict

Introduction to the Symposium

Leslie Gelb,
President, Council on Foreign Relations

Mr. Gelb began his remarks by stating that the subject of this conference is one that is very often embarked on when a new war starts. The questions of whether journalists are covering the war correctly are always raised, and as a result, there's very little new to say. And yet, what has been learned from those oft-repeated discussions in the past is very quickly forgotten.

So it takes a new war to address these questions again. Each time these questions are raised, the learning process of journalists is also renewed. And that is exactly why it is 'worth it' to discuss this subject.

Reflecting on his long experience as a journalist (almost one-half of Gelb's career was as a journalist, in many different capacities), led him to recount the 'classic journalist story' about a correspondent who flies into Moscow during the cold war. A local friend asks him when he arrived: "Yesterday," he responds. He is asked when he will be leaving: "Tomorrow," he says. Why is he there? To write a book called "the Soviet Union: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow." The point of the anecdote was to raise an issue that Mr. Gelb sees as critical to a discussion of journalism: that journalists today have to learn and write about situations instantly, before they even begin to 'know' about them. What's more, Gelb argued, for all the difficulties this represents, it is good that it is that way.

Mr. Gelb offered three main propositions that he believes frame the subject:

1. Journalists report on wars better than governments fight/prosecute them;
2. Journalists in the field generally do better job of reporting than their counterparts who write from their own capitals;
3. Training and norms of reporting on war are just the same as those during peacetime, except more so. We shouldn't inject a new set of norms for journalists just because it's a war. They should do what they're always supposed to do—only it's harder in war.

Journalists Report On Wars Better Than Governments Fight Them

He supported his first proposition by explaining that governments 'are always screwing up the way they conduct wars.' This can be attributed to several factors: first, that governments almost always have very confused objectives when going to war. It commonly takes several weeks and months to figure out why they're involved in a conflict. Examples abound, including the current war in the Balkans, the Gulf War, and Vietnam. This lack of clear objectives leads governments to do very foolish things throughout their waging of their campaigns.

Secondly, leaders aren't very honest with one another, let alone with the public, on their objectives and motives. They understand that their actions will be recorded in history books and therefore want to put an unreasonably positive light on those actions and their results. This has a destabilizing and "bunkerizing" effect in which these decision-makers crowd together; when times are good they are very supportive of one another, but when things go bad, they split apart and begin sniping at each other to the press, creating a poisonous atmosphere. Only a combination of good leadership and good results can prevent this type of effect.

Third, governments also often stumble while fighting wars because the Military has its own problems. The Services are huge organizations that operate in mechanistic/formalistic ways that are very difficult for outsiders to understand. These methods can often clash with political and practical necessities.

Journalists are in a better position for a number of reasons. First, they posses an instinct to ask many good questions, for example about the objectives of an operation, which allow them to 'get to the core of a matter', the critical function of the media. Second, unlike governments, they have little at stake other than their own reputations. They're not making policy, and therefore are not subject to the 'destabilizing' effects so evident on decision-makers. As a "fly on the wall," journalists are more likely to be able to look at a situation critically than their government counterparts. For example, during the war in Vietnam, while policy-makers floundered in their attempts to assess the current state of the campaign, a journalist called Johnny Apple produced the single best statement of where we were as of 1967 in an article called "the Stalemated War."

However, journalists also face difficulties in their coverage of war in comparison to governments. The main difficulty, according to Mr. Gelb, is their tendency to want to 'take temperatures all the time.' This constant need for assessment does harm to the quality of reporting.

The fact that journalists do a better job covering war than governments do at prosecuting them creates an awesome responsibility for journalists. They are part of the process not only of exposing problems and reporting difficulties, but they must also contribute to the process of 'fixing up' the prosecution of the war, because the stories that are written—critical, analytical, or straight news—become part of the intelligence system for the policy makers as well.

Reporters in the Field or in the Capitals

Reporters who stay in their capital offices often face a difficult dilemma in their efforts to remain critical and skeptical observers of policy-making: the social lives between journalists and officials tend to be 'fused', leading to a reluctance on the part of journalists to criticize those officials whom they interact with socially. Thus, journalists in capitals "often don't do a good job of digging up the truth until very late in the game."

Also, counter-intuitively, these very journalists, according to Gelb, tend to not be well informed about decision-making processes. They are not interested in learning how things work, only in learning 'facts'. Gelb pointed to the tendency of journalists to lend great importance to 'meetings' in their coverage, even though very few important decisions are actually made at meetings at all.

In the field, the dynamics are different. There is less reliance on officials, the journalists who 'get to the scene' do justice to it better than their Washington counterparts. Reporters in the field 'have their eyes,' which is a very powerful tool, much more powerful than what one hears from officials.

Training

Turning to the question of training journalists and teaching them norms of conduct, Gelb deplored that training in international journalism often doesn't include training 'on substance' (as opposed to training on delivery, writing, or other skills) such as they have in science or business journalism. Furthermore, editors would rather have untrained journalists; it is often reasoned that too much training in a substantive issue will turn a journalist into a sort of expert, too distant from the public to effectively communicate the ideas they are covering.

Norms

Gelb stated that he was tempted to say that 'no norms are good norms.' There are, however, some 'guidelines' that are important for journalists to keep in mind.

First, it must be remembered that "journalists are in the business of news, not truth. When journalists forget that, they do very misleading and destructive things." News is what you can honestly find out that day. This is a constant process that bows to reality and doesn't impose any view on that reality. Truth, on the other hand, is better left to pundits, foreign policy experts, and editorial writers.

The second guideline is that journalists should 'keep coming back to basics,' for instance focusing on pursuing questions as far as they can be taken. They should, for example, continually probe deeper to present alternatives on foreign policy choices instead of relying on the choices that are offered to them by officials.

A final guideline, and perhaps the most important one, is that reporters should understand that when a war occurs, they work for the people, not for their papers or their governments. Without good, accurate, hard, day-to-day reporting, people would have little or no sense of the state of the or whether it was worth fighting for in the first place.

Questions:

In response to an audience question dealing with the difference between the American and European media, and specifically 'why it took so long to report something here that was in the Italian media three weeks ago,' Gelb indicated that Americans, in his opinion, are far more culture-bound than other cultures and know less about other cultures. Americans can afford not to learn about the rest of the world, and often don't. Officials often know almost nothing about the area they are making policy for. Accordingly, for American reporters in the field, people going out to these places for the first time, it is a slow learning process. Perhaps some prior training in this respect would be useful.

In response to a question posed by Jane Holl regarding the interviewing of journalists by other journalists, Gelb commented that journalists have always interviewed each other. The main change is that this activity used to be conducted in private; now it is in the public domain. Conversations that used to happen in bars are now on television. This gives the journalists the same exposure and vulnerability as public officials. The journalists then have a stake in making true what they said on television, an ethically dangerous state of affairs.

 

Session One: Ethical Issues in Conflict Coverage

Chair: Donald Johnston
Director, International Media and Communications, School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University

This panel discussion on ethical issues in conflict coverage is especially pertinent in view of the Kosovo conflict but also in view of the Littleton, CO shootings [where two student gunmen entered a school with guns and explosives, killing 13 others and themselves]. Conflicts continue all over the world and are of all types, posing many issues for the panel to reflect on.

Bill Blakemore
Correspondent, ABC News

Mr. Blakemore began by making the observation that it is important to distinguish 'media' from 'journalism', two words that are in no way synonymous. Journalists use as many media as they can to get their point across.

Upon returning from covering the Gulf War, a question that seemed not to be addressed by his profession occurred to Blakemore: what is the difference between propaganda and journalism? Yet when he approached his colleagues to discuss this, he found them by and large unwilling to broach the subject.

Journalism vs. Propaganda

Before embarking on a comparison, Blakemore laid out a few elements that are a part of journalism. He first noted that the idea of objectivism has only been part of the profession since the 1920s or 30s, that before then in the modern world, no one expected journalists to try to be objective. Second, he noted that the profession does not require the 1^st amendment; 'we assume it.' It was freedom of speech that 'allowed journalists to make fools of themselves' in the first place, allowing them to work as propagandists, which in turn created a taste and desire from readers for objective reporting.

The principal difference between a professional propagandist and a professional journalist is that the former deliberately hides the biases of the information he is producing, while the latter self-consciously displays those biases for the world to see. Furthermore, journalists continually engage in self-critique in order to better find and display those biases they weren't previously aware of. Blakemore also noted that an editorial page is still journalism precisely because it is a main vehicle for that particular media outlet to display its biases openly.

Ethics in War Reporting: a few rules

Blakemore then moved on to discuss ethics in conflict: in order best to do so, he revealed a code of rules that he had developed for himself through his reporting in the Gulf war -the first war in history in which the public came to expect regular daily reporting from an "enemy capital," a fact that inevitably focused attention on the notion of journalism as a profession. Out of the seven rules of journalism that Mr. Blakemore describes in his article, "Reporting from Baghdad During the Gulf War: Principles for Judgement" (St. John's Law Review, Vol. 66, No. 3, Fall 1992), he chose to highlight two that he thought crucial to this discussion:

Rule No. 1: "It had to be possible at all times to tell my editors and audience about any and all restriction placed on us regarding our reporting." This, Mr. Blakemore argued, must always be true.

Rule No. 4: "I would request ...military clearance (not "censorship") from relevant local authorities." Blakemore finds it critical "there be no question in anybody's mind that my purpose might be secretive in any military sense; therefore, I need continuing agreement—"clearance"—that I am not dealing in sensitive military strategic information."

Rule No. 5: "I would not take part in any reporting activity which I thought might increase the chances that ANY human—in uniform or not, on any side or none—would be injured or killed." Flesh and blood, said Blakemore, always come before profession or career.

Television: Two 'Myths'

As the only broadcaster present, Mr. Blakemore also presented some thoughts on television's role in this discussion. He chose to expose two myths that he saw were widely held about television: First of all, said Blakemore, it is simply not true that television is primarily a visual media. Here he discussed the fact that for any one piece on a television news show, there had to be three sequences—a combination of video, words (audio), and sounds, that are then combined by the brain. None of these inputs (visual, verbal, or sound) are necessarily more important than the other. The second myth Blakemore deconstructed was the idea that "there are some things you can't cover on TV." Calling this statement 'rubbish', Blakemore indicated that television story that seems shoddy is a result of a "lack of imagination" and not of inherent limitations of the medium.

Turning to current affairs, Blakemore's final point was that journalists, governments, and society as a whole, have learned that there were important lessons from World War II: that human rights violations do give us the right to intervene, and that we should not 'wait until 1939'. In Kosovo, one main warning sign of the coming violence was Milosevic's gross abuse of the profession of journalism. According to Blakemore, Milosevic used television and the written word to produce a propaganda that was disguised as journalism to excuse genocide. As a result, perhaps we should be quicker and more effective in our criticism of situations the profession is abused. In fact, it might be a valiant goal to work towards intervention on behalf of the principles of professional journalism.

Michael Ignatieff
Author, The Warrior's Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience

Mr. Ignatieff began by praising Mr. Blakemore's work, particularly the aforementioned article, from which he said he had learned a great deal, particularly as regards television journalism.

His presentation was centered around six main rules or injunctions that he had formulated for himself over the course of his long journalistic career that guided him when he ran across an ethical dilemma in conflict coverage:

1. Stick to what you know.

This first rule, Ignatieff argued, is especially important in the case of journalists interviewing journalists. Oftentimes, and for many reasons, journalists fall into the moral trap of pretending to be pundits. Journalists caught in this situation must constantly ask themselves: what do they really know? Are they just repeating something they read? The kinds of interviews that he saw given by some journalists smacked of real-time punditry and displayed 'a dangerous lack of epistemological modesty.'

2. Don't demonize the enemy.

This rule is particularly salient as regards the conflict in the Balkans, Ignatieff argued, inasmuch as we are demonizing both the Serbian government and the Serbian people. This demonization is dangerous because it allows decision-makers to critically misperceive the situation. We seem to forget, for example, that Milosevic has been elected and therefore has electoral legitimacy, as well as popular support. We are not dealing with a tyrant who took over a country by force. This should inform policy-makers' view of the situation as well as the formulation of their goals.

Secondly, contrary to the unspoken presupposition of some reports, we should not allow the Serbian people to be seen as having some sort of psychotic predisposition towards violence. A reporter had recently asked him for expert commentary on the 'predisposition towards psychopathic violence in the Serbian psyche.' Journalists 'should not allow themselves to talk this vicious talk.'

3. Don't believe anyone, not even the victims.

The third rule is that every testimony, including and especially that of victims, must be subject to skeptical review. Ignatieff referred to interviews he conducted of refugees during his recent trip to Macedonia. The refugees, instead of telling exactly what they saw, "were giving us exactly what we wanted. They're not stupid..." One must, in the end, be on guard against being overly credulous of horrific accounts.

4. Your first loyalty in ethical terms is always to yourself.

Clearly, one must always be able to look in the mirror and know that what one has said is as accurate and faithful to what was seen as can be reported. Ultimately, no one else will know if the reporter slightly alters a quote or cuts a statement to make it reflect something that was not meant by the speaker.

5. Do not trade independence for access.

What is meant by this rule is that a journalist should not accept tacit bargains that leave them indebted to anyone. No one should expect slanted treatment in return for the granting of access to a source of information.

6. Do not confuse fairness and impartiality.

Be fair without pretending to be impartial. Journalists should never stop asking questions, tough questions to all sides.

In conclusion, Ignatieff that the two qualities most necessary for journalists to deal with ethical issues in conflict coverage are moral passion and intelligence.

Ed Vulliamy
Correspondent, The Guardian
Bureau Chief and Correspondent, London Observer

Mr. Vulliamy's remarks were centered on the dilemmas that he has faced in his reporting career, and more specifically how his decision to not remain neutral in the face of horrendous criminality related to his profession.

One of the questions that has haunted Vulliamy since he had the 'accursed honor' of discovering the death camps of Bosnia, writing about them, and watching as no efforts were made by governments to remedy the situation, is the following:

"...what it is about a democratic society that can be confronted for three years with the kind of violence that we saw first hand in Bosnia and conclude that it was 'okay', basically, it was something to be negotiated with, talked about, and even six months after Srebrenica, cut a deal over with the man who flies to Dayton and drives around in a limousine."

For all it's shortcomings, Vulliamy was still not willing to give up on journalists altogether: "people complain about the mass media, and boy, so do I, but when we're not around, what goes on—the mind boggles."

According to Vulliamy, what separates journalism from other professions that might be involved in war-like situations is the principle of neutrality. That is the bedrock of the profession. No other profession—academia, politics, diplomacy, the military—is so bound to that principle. But it is precisely that imposition of neutrality that has resulted in some of the most complicated moral and ethical dilemmas that face journalists today.

The Dilemma

As Vulliamy stated, "neutrality is supposed to be the bedrock of our profession. So what do we do when we get to these points in history when neutrality, as any good Swiss gold banker will tell you, is not neutral at all but complicity in the crime?" Vulliamy indicated that Bosnia was one of these situations and it now looks as if Kosovo might also be one.

First, Vulliamy sought to divorce neutrality from objectivity. He agreed with Gelb and Ignatieff in saying that objectivity, inasmuch as it is fact-specific, is sacred, just as accuracy is sacred.

But neutrality can be so severely tested by witnessing atrocities that it could take a 'neutral' journalist over the line into complicity. Mr. Vulliamy was faced with exactly that situation when he 'stumbled' into the Bosnian death camps "just down the road from Venice, eyeball to eyeball with the inmates that the politicians and the diplomats already know about but have deemed to be 'okay' and to be neutral about..."

The implicit question put to journalists in this situation is whether a journalist take action—whether it be testifying in court against a criminal or become an advocate for an action or reaction by the international community—when confronted with these extreme ethical situations. Another example by Vulliamy left us with no doubt as to his stand on the matter: a journalist witnesses an old woman being mugged on the street—should that journalist hide behind a claim of neutrality instead of testifying that he did indeed see the mugger assault the old woman?

Vulliamy's answer: as a citizen, everyone has a duty to testify—as much a duty to oneself as anything else. And so he did, testifying at The Hague against a war criminal he had interviewed twice before. Did he cross an ethical line that is not for journalists to walk over?

In the end, Vulliamy's remarks, he said, were meant as introductory and did not pretend to enunciate conclusions; rather, he wanted to raise a set of ethical questions that are likely to face journalists more and more often and that should be discussed. "As journalism becomes closer and closer to the eyeballs of what's happening, the whole question of journalists's neutrality becomes an extremely complicated one, because there is no neutrality between camp guard and inmate, between gang rapist and rape victim."

"On the other hand, we must also think about our right to call on the neutrality of those academics, diplomats, politicians, political leaders, and pundits, who insist upon their neutrality, when neutrality is not neutral at all but complicit in the crime."

Gadi Wolfsfeld
Senior Fellow, U.S. Institute of Peace Professor, Hebrew University

Mr. Wolfsfeld began his presentation by wondering why researchers—and journalists as well—almost exclusively focus their studies/reports on media and war, instead of media and peace. Is it because conflict is inherently dramatic, a 'sexier' issue to study? For whatever reason, a review of the literature proves out this lack of study of the role of the news media in the process of peace: not one major study, for example, has looked at the role of the news media in an ongoing peace process since the Gulf War.

The media can play an important role in creating a positive environment for peace: they can demonize or legitimize enemies, they can emphasize the benefits of peace or the risks of compromise, and they can monitor the peace processes for progress.

News Routines and Peace: an inherent contradiction

In the end, though, Wolfsfeld remains pessimistic about the possibilities for the media's role in conflict. He sees an inherent contradiction between the nature of a peace process and news routines that often lead to a destructive role for the news media in attempt at peacemaking. There are four elements of news routines that make covering a peace process extremely difficult for journalists: their emphasis on immediacy, drama, simplicity, and ethnocentrism and hostility towards adversaries.

"If we want to understand how destructive the media will play in any peace process, the more the media moves along the tabloid continuum, the more it becomes a tabloid, then the more the need for drama increases, the more the need for immediacy increases, the more entertainment functions become the primary motive, and the more destructive the role the media plays. Indeed I would argue that the tabloid journalism which has become prevalent in Israel is one of the greatest threats not only to peace in Israel but also to Israeli democracy in general."

The media's emphasis on immediacy is exemplified by its ability to deal only with events and not processes. He used the metaphor of a stock report—useless without any background information on the trends affecting the behavior of what is being studied—to describe the ongoing way the media reports on peace processes. In a peace process, the event often becomes the context. That is, each person has to defend the process in light of the context set by the event rather than try to see the event in the light of the general process.

The basic work of peace is long, boring, complicated, and often secret. When negotiations are moving along sucessfully, the last thing negotiators want to do is tell the media. Secrecy is only pierced when things are going wrong. This two-way flow of influence is as follows: if the media reports too much on the compromises that are occurring in a peace process, those compromises will stop, and the process will grind to a halt. If the

The problems for peace caused by the media's emphasis on drama are exemplified by a situation in Israel wich Mr. Wolfsfeld calls the 'process of editorial doves and hard news hawks.' Journalists are by-and-large doves—in favor of the peace process. Ironically, as journalists, they have a vested interest in conflict and violence (stemming from the fact that conflict and violence sell). When asked about this penchant for sensational journalism that was clearly detrimental to the peace processes, a journalist friend of Mr. Wolfsfeld's told him that "the person who will promote me is my editor, not Shimon Peres."

Thus, in the Middle East, despite the support for the peace process by so-called leftist journalists, negative news about the peace process overwhelms positive news.

The role of the media, however, can vary over time and circumstance. This is evidenced by the very different role the news media played in the Middle East peace process and that of Northern Ireland. In Belfast, for example, the negotiating parties, Protestants and Catholics, have a shared media: they read the same papers in the same language. In the Middle East, however, the press is either in Hebrew or Arabic. Each language comes with attendant inflammatory language and points of view. Secondly, in Belfast, the major press dealing with the peace process is not a tabloid press and seems more 'responsible' than that covering the peace process in Israel. And finally, the news media in Belfast were aided by the fact that there was a greater public consensus in favor of the peace process, which meant that journalists felt more comfortable being an advocate of the peace process. In the Middle East, deep splits in public opinion are amplified by the news media, due in part to the newsworthiness of such conflicts.

Discussant: Bernard Kalb
Host, "Reliable Sources," CNN

Mr. Kalb praised the panel for displaying passion regarding their profession, as exemplified by the vocabulary and depth of commentary used to explore some of the issues discussed.

Kalb first sought clarification of Mr. Blakemore's remarks concerning Blakemore's statement that "there may be a need to intervene when we see the ideals of professional journalism abused." Blakemore responded that he thought that criticism could be more articulate about the ideals of the profession and its use in other countries. Kalb brought up organizations such as Radio Free Europe, the BBC, and Voice of America that made efforts towards piercing the curtain of propaganda with broadcasts of truth.

Secondly, he wondered about Mr. Blakemore's assertion that television is not 'primarily a visual medium.' In Mr. Kalb's opinion, very often, the 'eye triumphs over the ear.'

Kalb next took up Mr. Ignatieff's remarks and highlighted the importance of Ignatieff''s fourth 'rule', that the first loyalty of a reporter is one's loyalty to oneself. He took exception to Ignatieff's fifth rule, arguing that one should be wary of assuming (or presupposing) that access is equivalent to loss of independence, or even that one is a trade for the other. In his own experience of traveling as a reporter on Henry Kissinger's plane, Kalb asserted that neither he nor his colleagues were there as a "blank slate" or "as a blotter or some sort of megaphone" for Kissinger. Competent journalists, argued Kalb, maintain the level of skepticism vis-à-vis their source that is necessary in most situations.

He next took up the important theme of neutrality and complicity raised by Mr. Vulliamy's remarks. "If you go cover a story, and you become an eyewitness to it, and you are telling us exactly what happen, it may very well be that a repudiation of neutrality can indeed approximate the truth. In other words, there doesn't need to be a gap between neutrality and objectivity." Kalb argued that it is not necessary for a reporter to inject one's own opinions and moral outrage in order to be convincing. "The facts shout for themselves," he said, and journalists should let readers arrive at and feel their own moral outrage. Neutral reporting can be objective. And what's more, "if we surrender objectivity across the board ...how do we subject your lack of neutrality to the test of whether what you are telling us is true?" Ultimately, argued Kalb, advocacy should be left on to the professionals on the editorial page.

Mr. Kalb also found the indictment of the media's 'destructive' role in peace processes by Mr. Wolfsfeld to be a bit strong; although he recognizes the news media's need for drama and immediacy, he felt that the media was not always so boring, as evidenced by Sadat, Oslo, and the 1993 Mid East conference at the White House. Journalism still provides an illumination of the peace processes, whatever its drawbacks. Where else would one go for that information? In sum, the word destructive is too condemnatory.

Following Mr. Kalb's remarks, Mr. Blakemore pointed out that his comments were meant to convey the idea that we shouldn't presume that television would always exclusively be 'primarily a visual medium,' insofar as pictures won't always necessarily override the words. Very often the words override the pictures more often than one thinks, said Mr. Blakemore.

Questions:

In response to a question by Jane Holl, Blakemore discussed the targeting of the Serbian Television station. Mr. Kalb pointed out that from an analytical perspective, the bombing failed. Mr. Ignatieff mentioned that Western funders (including in particular the Soros foundation) have supported the independent media of the region for many years. He wanted to emphasize how courageous and vital that independent media has been and how much support it has had from the outside world. As for the bombing, Ignatieff said that the television station was something that the Milosevic government depends on, although he continued to have 'great discomfort' about it. Mr. Gutman then posed a question regarding the legitimacy of targeting newspapers as well as television, since the press has been every bit as responsible for what the television is being accused of. Mr. Ignatieff responded that it might not be an advisable tactic to black out the media—because it would also silence the opposition and make it harder to produce regime change than otherwise.

 

Session Two: Training Journalists

Chair: Anne Nelson
Director, International Program, Columbia School of Journalism

The topic of today's discussion was especially salient in the U. S. in 1999, began Nelson, since there appears to be no culture of covering war. "When wars occur, people (journalists) are often thrown into them with very little training, very little preparation, and that can lead to faulty coverage, it can also lead to personal danger."

A Wish List

In an attempt to answer the question of what kind of preparation might help, Nelson presented a 'wish list' of what Journalists going out into the field to cover conflict should know and what kind of preparation should be appropriate:

1. Journalists should know something about that region and that conflict; in particular, they should have some local linguistic proficiency.
2. they should have some understanding of geopolitics and diplomacy (for example, the inner workings of NATO).
3. They should have background knowledge of military conflicts; this would ideally include such details on how landmines are used, what bombardment strategies function and which don't, what kinds of rifles exist and how they are used, etc.
4. They should have a working knowledge of international law, what the laws of war are, which would help them sort out such issues as the legal definition of a civilian, etc.
5. Functioning safely in a field of conflict (how to avoid landmines, what kind of license plates one should put on their car, etc.)
6. They need training in technology (such as a satellite phone) and logistics in order to be able to file their stories reliably.

This training, in an academic setting, would take over 10 years and $300,000. What can one do in the face of that impossibility? Journalists must at a minimum have the skills to report who is doing what to whom, as well as the analytical capacity in order to say who are the players and what are their motivations. They should also be able to work with compassion, understanding, and analytical capability.

Seymour Topping
Sanpaolo Professor of International Journalism and Administrator, The Pulitzer Prizes, Columbia School of Journalism

Mr. Topping's remarks began with a laudatory evaluation of the first panel, describing those who spoke as exemplifying qualities required for performance as a good correspondent. Those qualities cited and displayed included passion, courage, technique, neutrality, and a critical eye.

A critical stage that occurs even before training reporters who go abroad, there is a critical process that perhaps even more pressingly calls for training: the selection of journalists to go abroad and cover conflicts. According to Topping, the poor selection of reporters sent abroad is the most frequent cause of failures. In considering the selection of foreign correspondents, the criteria should include experience, previous performance, a good education, language skills, but the most important qualities are an enduring commitment to a story, courage, an unrelenting determination, and what Topping calls 'fire in the belly.'

"The difference between an effective foreign editor and a desk bureaucrat is the ability to identify those human characteristics in making decisions about staff."

Veering Away from Advocacy

The idea of neutrality came up in Mr. Topping's remarks as well, who said that when he was Managing Editor at the New York Times, he would not have tolerated some of the stories that are now on its front page. "Too many expository stories, too many analysis stories, not enough hard news." Today, he believes, society has changed and newspapers have appropriately changed with them.

What is the line to be drawn between news analysis and advocacy reporting? Mr. Topping believes that "while there is a need for explanatory and analytical reporting, more of a need than in the past ...still, giving them the facts, veering away from advocacy reporting I still believe is the best approach. What I think a reporter should be doing, and what we ought to be training reporters to do, is to lay out the facts in such a way that it creates an incentive in society to take action."

The Role of J-Schools

Mr. Topping also addressed the role of Journalism schools in teaching journalists to deal with ethical issues in conflict reporting. J-schools, he said, do and must talk about moral and ethical issues. Guest speakers at Columbia's school (such as co-panelist Roy Gutman) discuss the temptation to 'slip into advocacy reporting' when governments fail to respond to stories about, for example, genocide.

Topping described a course he teaches at the Columbia University School of Journalism, in which students make preparations as if to go on assignment in a particular conflict area as being particularly useful. He also described his own experience as a student of the University of Missouri School of Journalism. There, he explained, he learned a sense of moral responsibility, something about reporting, something about the structure of a news story, but most importantly, he left with an inspiration to be the best reporter he could. For Topping, that is the true potential of a school of journalism.

Edward Girardet
Editor, Crosslines Global Report

Whenever students ask Mr. Girardet what they should study in order to become a foreign correspondent, he tends to respond "whatever you do, don't go to J-school. Learn history, languages, travel, go work in a kitchen. Get experience." However, he did wish that he had had a bit more experience when starting as a journalist, which he could have gotten perhaps at a journalism school, instead of learning on the job as he did.

Before addressing how his organization trains journalists, Girardet pointed out that "whenever I come back to the States, the land of communications, I find that I'm in a desert. I turn on the television, and I'm not learning anything. It's trash. ...It is very distressing, because when you are trying to teach or help local journalists in conflict zones to understand the concepts of journalism you have to hold up certain standards..."

The primary focus of Mr. Girardet's discussion was his organization's efforts towards the training of local journalists. Specifically, he described his organization's attempt to aid local journalists in Albania to cover the unfolding refugee crisis.

Reporting for Refugees

When the refugee crisis broke out, the immediate reaction of Girardet and his colleagues was to want to help inform the civilian refugees. Usually, aid communities see food and shelter as the primary concerns; information, however, is also critical need. Getting refugees vital information, such as how to deal with trauma, how to deal with life in refugee camps, what to do if infected with a disease, even such basic information as where might be a safe place to go, and much more.

Mr. Girardet's efforts were rewarded when the Soros Foundation offered funding for his project and when Radio Tirjana offered two 1/2 hours a day of programming on their local station, as long as Mr. Girardet and his colleagues put together the local team and created the programs. Although Albania did not have a tradition of free journalism, the extraordinary enthusiasm and willingness to learn of these inexperienced journalists translated into a successful endeavor.

Training by Girardet included discussions on such issues as the need for a plurality of sources, what kinds of questions to ask (and being assertive enough to ask those questions), distinguishing between sources (such as the International Red Cross, the Ministry of Information, etc.) and being skeptical about what they tell you, and more. The most difficult questions raised had to do with the potential manipulation of journalists by their sources. "You are serving the needs of the refugees," he told them. "You have to ask the sort of questions which will help refugees better understand the situation and know what to do."

The end result of this program of on-the-job training, according to Mr. Girardet, has been to represent and empower the refugees by supplying them with essential credible information on such critical issues as their basic legal rights in a 60-minute radio format. Girardet plans to continue the training of the team he assembled in Tirjana at the International Center for Humanitarian Reporting in Geneva.

Kemal Kurspahic
Former Editor, Oslobejenje

Mr. Kurspahic, former editor-in-chief of a Bosnian independent daily, admitted that "I actually never trained my reporters at the paper back in Sarajevo to cover conflict. I tried to train them to cover the news." When the war broke out in April 1992, Kurspahic's staff's experience reporting the news—limited by previous lack of press freedom—came to a test. However, there were examples of great reporting nonetheless.

"On April 9, 1992, a small town correspondent for my paper ... knew that he was facing a death threat. A day before he was killed he sent us three pieces of news. The main one was titled: "Three Arkhan Men Arrested in Zvornik" The subject of it was that "they claimed they came to Zvornik because they were concerned about Muslims being harmed." I think that is the most perfect example of everything you want to see in objective reporting. He gave a voice to the very people who came ahead of the forces that would kill him tomorrow." The correspondent stayed to cover the taking of the town by Serb forces, and was killed at his desk in front of his old-fashioned typewriter.

Covering the Bosnian war was not his staff's first experience dealing with publishing under adverse conditions; his paper had come under sniper and machine gun fire in the early 80s. At that time, Kurspahic insisted that his newspaper continue to publish for three main reasons: the paper's long history and tradition, inspiration from the hundreds of foreign colleagues who would come and risk their lives covering a conflict that ultimately did not affect them or their families, and finally, and perhaps most importantly, the responsibility that the newspaper felt vis-à-vis their readers, who had recently begun to trust the paper as a reliable source and not just another party newspaper. Just before the war, it had been one of the first to open its pages to dissention opinions.

Kurspahic also recounted how the media had been used in wartime in the Bosnian conflict. In 1991, 7 or 8 months before the war started in Bosnia, Serbian paramilitary forces took over broadcast facilities that covered large part of Bosnia and turned their antennas towards Belgrade in order to be sure that residents of that area could only exposed to Milosevic's propaganda. Immediately following the start of the war, another main transmitter in central Bosnia was taken over by the army (and a security guard killed) "to make sure that everyone else in Bosnia could only see what Milosevic tells them."

To Kurspahic and his colleagues, then, "violence is not that strange." In fact, his opinion of the bombing of the Serbian TV facilities was that "it's not the first time that I've faced media outlets being bombed."

This prompted him to share his view of western journalists covering the Balkan conflicts: Kurspahic said that although he has the utmost respect for most of the coverage, there were instances in which he found it lacking. "Just parachuting into the area without prior knowledge of forces at work, without really knowing the actors and their history, doesn't prepare you for anything you face there. And then you are very vulnerable to any interpretation of events."

He also addressed western support of free and independent media in Belgrade: "The idea of supporting and running free media in totalitarian society is just an oxymoron. One of the new myths that one can witness in the western press is that NATO intervention somehow silenced the Serbian opposition. Unfortunately, I think that functioning, working, real opposition did not exist in Belgrade before this intervention, so there is nothing to feel sorry about, except decent individuals—any of them deserve the most respect we can give them."

Roy Gutman
Diplomatic Correspondent, Newsday

Mr. Gutman began his talk with the following remark:

"My instinct when I hear the word 'training' is to recoil, to get out of town, to go the other way. I think it's a typical journalistic instinct, because we tend to feel that we are self-training people. That we go in with naive questions and the deliberate aim of educating ourselves and at the end of the day, we hope we figure it out."

Having said that, Gutman's effort to coordinate a book on war crimes, the essence of which is training, is a result of the frustration that was illuminated by the first panel's discussion. That is, what do you do when—as a journalist—you're "out there in the field covering a story that is totally compelling to you and that you don't seem to be able to convince the rest of the world about?"

The particular story he broke and felt unable to convey well enough to prompt action was that of the death camps in Bosnia, which he stumbled into with Ed Vulliamy. After writing the story, Gutman felt as though somehow he had failed to convince governments to do something about it. In fact, governments denied his facts and came out with counter-stories, trying to "throw sand in everyone's eyes."

It is that frustration that has led Gutman to cross the line into thinking that some additional training might be useful. After covering four wars in the Balkans, Mr. Gutman believes that the number one obligation for journalists covering these terrible events was to get the facts and to convey them as convincingly as possible to maintain credibility at all cost. Journalists must be willing to risk their and their employers' reputations on the conviction that they have the facts right.

Gutman's response was to recycle his material, trying to find where he could better assemble the parts of his story to convey the facts on the ground. Essentially, he felt that if he hadn't been able to move readers to action (and given that the facts themselves were self-evidently compelling) he had not done his job well enough. That process of not seeing a reaction and working to improve his material, he said, generally summed up his experience in Bosnia.

We have, however, come a long way from the conflict in Bosnia. Governments, far from denying the war crimes in Kosovo (as they did in Bosnia), are making them the central theme of their campaign (even though Gutman thinks the real basis for the intervention is a strategic one- that a domino effect could lead to a regional and wider war). Also, there were very few reporters covering war crimes in Bosnia, whereas this time around, it seems a basic theme of the coverage. If one considers this as a result of the profession having drawn lessons from the past, it would tend to give credence to the above assertion that journalists are 'self-training.'

That self-training of journalists still has a fair ways to go. Journalists still make mistakes due to their ignorance. Gutman described the example of the use of the word 'refugees' instead of the more appropriate word 'deportees;' this is a critical issue in the current coverage, because deportation is a crime against humanity as defined at the Nuremberg tribunal. Most people don't realize that that is a defined war crime and therefore many journalists are calling them refugees. Other issues come up, such as the legality of bombing the Serbian television station (a legally legitimate military target, according to Gutman's research). "The public shouldn't simply be given this emotional reaction from reporters over there; they should also be told that it's a legitimate military target in war."

Questions like these led Gutman and several colleagues to produce a book (Crimes of War: What The Public Should Know, Norton, to be published in summer 1999) that would provide reporters in the field and the general public with a sense of the standards, the existing rules (that have existed for a long time) such as the Geneva convention that apply to reporting on war crimes. This would allow journalists not to rely on government officials who would have a stake in whether, for example, an event is labeled a 'genocide' or something else.

In propagating the information in the book and taking the discussion to new levels, Gutman is currently seeking funding for an accompanying web site. The site is to help in the application of the rules and standards that are described in the book. Additionally, he'd like to organize training seminars and design elements of journalism school courses as well as high school programs to teach younger people about war crimes.

In response to a question by Anne Nelson regarding the protection granted to journalists under the Geneva Convention, Gutman read from his book a passage that described television and broadcast stations as legitimate military targets, a fact that he believes most of his colleagues—particularly television broadcasters—don't realize.

Discussant: Tim Carrington
World Bank

Mr. Carrington first addressed Nelson's 'wish list' for journalists, pointing out that as difficult as it is to train journalists in the US or Europe, it is infinitely more difficult to deliver that packages of skills and training to journalists in developing and transition countries.

Gutman's skepticism of training led Carrington to remark that indeed, it is difficult to say that the acts of journalistic courage and excellence that have been described throughout the symposium arose out of 'training' and not from some other intangible quality of a particular journalist (what Topping would call 'fire in the belly', for example).

In response to Gutman's book and its likely audience, Carrington noted that the discussion on norms and codes of conducts must include journalists in non-western, developed countries. For them, the practice of real journalism is often something very new, and they are actively seeking ties to the international community of journalists. Packages of training and resources that are being prepared for journalists here—such as Mr. Gutman's—should also be accessible by journalists all over the world.

When we take stock of the range of journalism globally, we can witness extremely destructive examples of outlets that have played active roles in fomenting hatred and inciting violence (for example some Rwandan radio and Serbian television stations) but we can also see examples of acts of courage and integrity that must also be held up. This led Carrington to ask: if journalists can play such a destructive role in ripping society apart, can they also play a role in reconciliation? Further, can international organizations help them to do fulfill that potential? Can these organizations intervene to help journalists fulfill the role of reconciliation, allowing them to introduce into the national conversation concerns about the future as well as grievances from the past?

He sought clarification from the panelists on the question of going to extraordinary lengths to learn the truth and put it together in a way that is credible and accurate and nothing happens. The question brought up by Carrington is the following: what does that mean for journalists to be attached to a certain outcome? When Mr. Gutman wrote about the death camps, for example, he certainly had in mind what kinds of reactions might be desirable in response to his articles.

Gutman responded that even though there was no action by governments, others reacted—for example, the UN debated the issue and set up a tribunal in response to the reports. It took this many years (the time since Bosnia) for governments to take war crimes seriously. That's certainly not because of the media- it's more likely because of the dozens of NGOs that sprang up over the issue. "It happens, but at a pace you could never predict. Things are changing."

Topping stated that "I don't believe there are any universal rules for the behavior of journalists. What we've been talking about today are the rules, guidelines, and philosophy, of American journalism. Our approaches to reporting and questions of objectivity appear differently. If I were a Bosnian or Cambodian journalists I might very well be moved... to indulge in advocacy reporting. ...However, if we're speaking about this country, and to a certain extent Britain, I think advocacy journalism is a mistake. It assumes that the journalist has the ultimate truth, and that's certainly not the case very often. Also, it is dangerous in destroying the credibility of the journalist." He also pointed out that the fairly well educated American public doesn't like to be talked down to, and so the best thing to do is to lay out the facts as best you can without advocating. That is a function of the op-ed page. "Trust your readers and viewers to eventually come to a point where they will exercise the necessary pressures on government to take the necessary action."

In response to a question from the floor regarding journalists' responsibility to cover newly coined war crime terms such as ethnocide, Gutman said that journalists should hold everybody to account for the documents they have signed and ratified and are party to. In other words, you don't have to come up with a new term to hold criminals accountable.

A question regarding the idea of the competence of journalists who 'parachuted' into the Balkans was fielded by Topping, who disagreed with the notion of a troop of correspondents who didn't know what they were talking about arriving on the scene and asking silly questions and generally reporting badly. A consequence of the war in Bosnia, however, was that a core of excellent highly experienced Balkan correspondents who are doing very good work now. On the whole, Topping argues, we are getting very good reporting from the Balkans.

Gutman took a final question regarding the lack of coverage and discussion of African conflicts. He agreed with the point of the question and asserted that if there was half the media attention paid to African conflicts that is currently being paid to Kosovo, it might make a difference in the resolution of those conflicts.

 

Session Three: Norms of Conduct

Chair: Jane Holl
Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict

Tom Gjelten
Diplomatic Correspondent, National Public Radio

Mr. Gjelten began his talk by pointing out the dramatically differences in the preparation/training of military personnel and journalists to deal with ethical questions/situations in a conflictual situation. Using an example taken from James Fallows' Breaking the News, he explained that military officers had no problem answering ethical dilemmas quickly and with confidence, due to extensive training they had had in dealing with contingencies. Journalists, on the other hand, are given no such training in ethical dilemmas and struggled with answering the same types of questions. Different journalists—even the best trained and most experienced—were likely to be of completely differing views and to react in opposite fashions to the same situations. Fallows' point, presumably, was that journalists should be given more training in these types of situations.

Gjelten, in defense of his profession, argued that this comparison by Fallows was somewhat unfair, inasmuch as the military was a very structured hierarchical organizations with very clear rules and boundaries, as well as stringent membership rules, where as journalism is a vast, amorphous uncontrolled body of unlicensed people who only need call themselves journalists to be one. Due to that heterogeneous nature of those participating in the profession, Gjelten felt that is was very difficult to implement any kind of training or norms. In journalism, he pointed out, there were almost no sanctions available to deal with those who don't abide by any rules of conduct. For example, a journalist who identified a source—the cardinal sin of journalism—can't be sanctioned by his colleagues.

Advancing Ethically Responsible Journalism

To advance the cause of ethically responsible journalism, then, Gjelten sees some sort of a peer review that by necessity has to be very informal. The lack of a professional association of journalists means that no 'code' or norms can be enforced. Discussion within the profession in forums such as these, then, is what Mr. Gjelten saw as the means by which progress could be made (although how much progress can truly be achieved remains 'a vexing question').

Gjelten addressed some pitfalls that faced journalists reporting on conflict. He had previously been asked to define professionalism in the context of war reporting (in a report for the Carnegie Commission (LINK HERE), and the reports' most important conclusion was that a journalist had to maintain distance from all interested parties so as not to be used as a propaganda tool by sources with an agenda. Journalists should be on guard from statements by all sources, who are not held to the same standards of truth that they are. He also emphasized the standards that should be adhered to in war reporting, chief among them being objectivity, about which Gjelten remarked: "I, for one, do not agree that we should forget about objectivity. It's obvious that objectivity in some absolute sense is impossible, but I do think that we should strive to be objective. To take that as a standard is not to say that we have hopes of really becoming objective, but if we define objectivity as telling the truth and being accurate and honest about it, I think that is a worthwhile goal."

Gjelten remarked that he was not comfortable with espousing some sort of code of conduct that is more specific than the elementary described above, due to the innumerable dilemmas that present themselves. If some sort of specific goals are formulated (such as reporting in the interest of conflict resolution or settlement of a conflict through diplomacy, or even not reporting a story that would enflame a situation), it is likely that these goals will come into conflict with one another or common sense.

Finally, Gjelten noted that although he does see a need to talk through these critical issues in war reporting, he draws back from being too specific about any of the issues for the reasons outlined above.

Chair: Jane Holl
Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict

Holl, in reference to Gjelten's comparison of journalism and the military, pointed out that the interaction between the military and the media has been very beneficial. She also underlined the difference in the two professions.

Robert Manoff
Director, Center for War, Peace, and Media, New York University

Mr. Manoff reminded the audience that the conference had up until that point been concerned almost exclusively with the question of wars, as opposed to the broader issue of conflict. It was not surprising, considering the historical context of the symposium, that the conference should be concerned with the coverage of war. Manoff chose to address his remarks more broadly to the broader question which in his view, encompasses societies that are not currently experiencing physical violence.

Manoff began with several clarifications. The first was that there must be a distinction made between media and journalism, but that a discussion of the latter can hold valuable points for an understanding of the former. Second, one must also keep in mind the distinction between journalism and hard news reporting (noting the exception of the opinion and editorial pages). Finally, it is important to note that "there is no such thing as journalism ...there are many 'journalisms.' Without even looking beyond our borders at international differences in the definition of journalism , we can see within our own system the latitude that sports writers, for example, have in putting their opinions into their reporting, which has nothing to do with rules and conventions dealing with political reporters.

Manoff's discussion offered several propositions on Media and Conflict:

• Journalism is the handmaiden of conflict. The epistemology of journalism is inherently conflictual ' in the same way that our system of jurisprudence is inherently adversarial'.

• Journalists' news judgement is predicated on conflict and our definition of conflict.

• Audiences love and savor conflict. This is the framework within which journalists labor.

• Journalism has increasingly been used as a force in conflict. The First World War was the first war in which journalistic resources were self-consciously mobilized by independent powers in the interest of achieving their war aims. That practice has carried through until today. This has happened too much, too often, with terrible consequences.

• Under several international conventions, incitement to genocide is a war crime. Is journalistic conduct under circumstances already specified under international treaty is already actionable under international terms?

• If journalism has contributed to violence by being used by those with violent agendas to advance their purposes, it is also true that historically, newspapers and broadcast media have served to create communities.

• Journalism can be destructive of a community, but it can also be powerfully constitutive of a community. It must be one or the other, but not both. "Because of the threat that violent conflict now poses to the world, I believe, journalists now face for the first time in the history of the profession have to choose: will journalists contribute to the destruction of communities or to the constitution of communities?"

• Experts have argued that bystanders play a role in propagating genocide—and journalism is,. in fact, the institutionalized bystander of the world. If journalists do not act, they are contributing to the violence of the world.

• The resort to professionalism or professional standards as a defense against the necessity of being engaged is nothing more than an ethical feint, a maneuver, an ideological running-for-cover. It is not an engagement with the issue. Why? Briefly, because those standards are those of the Anglo-Saxon press (the school of objective journalism), and not any kind of global consensus. There should be an effort made to access and address standards of whatever kind of journalism is available abroad, in those places where genocide is going to occur. Objectivity, furthermore, is only about 70 years old, and cannot be considered to be the ultimate truth and evolutionary end point of journalism. In fact, it was denounced when first employed in the U.S.

• In fact, because journalism changes, in arguing that journalists should be objective or that we should be anything, we should be very careful about an essentialism that assumes that journalism is now what it must always be or what is should always be.

• If journalism can change, it should change. And if journalism can change, "I would argue that journalism should change in response to the challenges posed by the prevalence of genocidal violence, in response to the vast human suffering to which the media have contributed, and in response to the fact that the media constitute a vast human resource that demands to be developed and mobilized in the interest of preventing communal and international conflict."

• "It is no longer sufficient to repeat the mantras of objectivity and to retreat to definitions of existing professionalism in the face of overwhelming evidence that media powerfully effect the course of events in the societies we are concerned with."

• Journalists can engage on these issues within the existing paradigms. "We don't have to change ourselves." Norms of good journalism as currently practiced are entirely consistent with norms of conflict resolution, and can be used to bring adversarial parties together.

• The media possess certain structural conflict resolution and prevention capabilities by virtue of what they are.

• Perhaps the most basic structural property of the media, and notably of journalism, is that communication creates communities. These can be communities of the engaged, people who recognize their moral relationship to peoples elsewhere in the world who are at risk, or these can be communities of the remote, who withdraw and fail to recognize human bonds. In places of conflict, these communities can be universal, incorporating a diversity of peoples, or they can be particularistic, hostile, suspicious, and self-regarding, prone to defining themselves in opposition to neighbors and finding a place in history by denying the same opportunity to others.

This ontological capacity of the media to define and create communities that they serve imposes a responsibility that can't be escaped or explained away. This responsibility can only be addressed by the profession as a whole, and over many years. It is critically important that this responsibility is recognized and taken up by a collective process of social invention in the years and decades to come.

Dapo Olorunyomi
Panos Institute

Media ethics, according to Mr. Olorunyomi, is currently in a state of crisis. The study of media and conflict is lacking a theoretical platform from which to launch appropriate study and discussion. The question of norms of war reporting is made more difficult by realizing that media and conflict are not sufficiently theorized to permit a thorough understanding of them.

Perhaps we should look at conflict anew- of course we are not talking only about war; we are talking about a continuum that culminates in a situation of war. There are locations within this continuum that can be correctly characterized as conflict.

Secondly, when you bring the realm of journalistic practice to that of conflict, you already run into a contradiction: questions of objectivity and truth indicate that when one is bringing two philosophical traditions to collide. How does one derive truth from media practice when a journalist has to add value to their report. This is in the realm of ethics.

So between realm of ethics and that of epistemology will always be this tension that journalists will have to resolve. Their ability to do so will impact on ability to generate standards of norms that this kind of enterprise can work with.

Mr. Olorunyomi then recounted the experiences of the Nigerian media as they faced a vicious dictatorship in 1993. The government began to make efforts towards the construction of cultural idealization. The question then surfaced: who spoke for the people? They published a newspaper underground in defiance of the regime's wishes, and recounted the serious problems that came along with being a journalist in such a difficult situation. One example he discussed was 'sourcing' a story. If they were writing about a government policy, they certainly could not claim to include both sides of the story, as interviewing a government official (while arrest warrants were hanging over them) was clearly out of the question. Although there were great acts of courage by journalists in that time—that 'happened to bring down the dictatorship ultimately—he does see those weaknesses in retrospect.

We are in an age in which two trends are fundamental: globalization on the one hand, on the cultural level, is an attempt to homogenize reality. Secondly, there is the incidence of new technology. As a response to these two categories, there is a cultural resistance of countries, communities, and identities. How does this impact on media performance in the context of conflicts? A deeper study of this topic could help journalists to formulate norms.

Olorunyomi commended theorists including Manoff as leading the way towards providing some sense of theory. "The notion that journalism is a skill has left the intellectual parts of that skill lacking. But it's important to constantly theorize this profession, because that's the only way to solve some of these problems."

Olorunyomi concluded by advancing the proposition that the issues that should inform our notion of norms for the journalistic profession must first derive from the sacredness of life itself. Once that is resolved, he said, other arguments—of neutrality and objectivity in the face of war crimes, for example—will fit into that framework. Secondly, the notion of the human community, of some kind of shared truth, will help us to break through some of the prior failings that have been imposed. Many after the Cold War and the general media majority idea that 'all news is local', which makes us very suspicious of the 'other man' or the 'other community... This has been responsible for the fact that coverage of Bosnia has been late, coverage of Rwanda, Somalia, Ethiopia, all these will continue to be late..."

Jay Rosen
Professor, New York University

As an academic interested in how journalists perceive themselves and what they do, Mr. Rosen has often asked young aspiring journalists and veteran reporters the same question: why go into journalism as a profession? The most common answer Mr. Rosen has gotten—from veteran journalists as well as students—is that that person wants 'to make a difference.' Almost no one replies that they go into journalism with a passion for objectivity or because they were particularly dispassionate or had 'a love for the fact.' And yet, when asked what they are trying to achieve through their work, most journalists will answer very differently than what they claimed was their objective: they'll usually say something like "I'm not trying to accomplish anything, I'm just trying to report on what is." Thus, simply to seek the truth.

There can't be a contradiction between these two assertions, because then the whole enterprise would be nonsensical, and there wouldn't be well-motivated and effective journalists. "When discussing norms of conduct, it doesn't help us to pretend that norms and goals and missions and attempts to achieve a better world are somehow incompatible with seeking the truth, because the very premise of a serious journalist's career is that that is in fact possible," said Rosen.

That is why our discussions about objectivity is important—it isn't necessary for journalists to put seeking the truth on one side and trying to accomplish something on the other. Sharp lines between advocacy and journalism aren't the end of the debate.

Rosen remarked that he believed the Carnegie Commission's goals in organizing this symposium were an attempt to define what sort of principles might guide those who are seeking the truth and what ends might be legitimate ends for truth seekers to hold.

Towards that end, argued Rosen, it behooves journalists to look at four or five places to understand how to make a difference and tell the truth at the same time. The first is human rights, where journalism has increasingly gone to in order to add a sense of purpose to their journalistic counts. International law has played a similar role. A third place is conflict resolution, in which the actors are enabled to tell a larger and even more urgent truth. If journalists take an interest in conflict resolution, they are more likely to become interested in many things that are important but don't often make news, such as NGOs, actors such as the Soros Foundations, the UN's role in conflict resolution, etc, because this is an aspect of the world that needs peoples' attention. Conflict resolution would lead journalists to many different kinds of stories that are worth telling.

Community formation could also be a useful place for journalists to draw guidance from, because journalists have a part in putting those communities together. "They place us as a member of one world, one community, and exclude us from another." If journalism can't exist without a civil society, it is then clearly of interest to journalists to study civil society as well.

Rosen concluded his remarks by saying that "I believe that we make an error when in these discussions we assume that the price of your interest in norms like conflict resolution is giving up your commitment to truth; it's the opposite. This is your pass, your entryway into a deeper understanding of what it means to seek truth in journalism. And the promise of conferences such as this and efforts such as the Carnegie Commission is to unfold that perspective."

Questions

A first audience question focused on the peculiarities of the American journalistic system, particularly its 'just the facts approach' is very atypical attitude internationally. The currently tumultuous state of American journalism as being denounced from all sides was also brought up. Also, the impression internationally of the American media is that "nobody tells it what to do, except within its own community," and that it is not very open to the kind of suggestions that Manoff and others would like it to be.

Gjelten disagreed with some points that various panelists raised. First, he remarked that Rosen's characterizations of why journalists enter the profession were 'unfair.' He raised the point that people who wanted to 'change the world' could have also done so in other professions such as social workers and others. So why do they choose journalism? For the expressed purpose of making complex stories understandably and to 'tell the truth and let the chips fall where they may.' It is his hope that good journalism responsibly practiced will, as Manoff laid out, promote human rights, prevent genocide, etc. "To the extent that we set out goals that we want to achieve through our journalism, we run into very dangerous territory.... I don't trust myself to set out the ends and to know that those are the ends that we should be working for.."

Rosen responded that he deeply credits journalists' commitment to tell the truth at all times. Nonetheless, he reemphasized the dual commitment to also 'making a difference.'

Furthermore, it is this commitment that would prevent them, as it did with Vulliamy, from declaring neutrality in certain situations.

Holl pointed out that the perceived unwillingness of American journalism to accept criticism from outside is not limited to this profession. It is also the case that lawyers and the military, for example, perceive themselves as self-disciplining. The mechanisms for that discipline are simply less clear.

Manoff commented that he believes that it's much worse in journalism. There is a radical disjunction between the practice of the profession and the practice of self-scrutiny in a systematic way. Practicing journalists are implacably hostile to even the practice of scrutiny of the profession.

Carrington agreed that journalism is 'different', but that being part of a credible news organization does lead to accountability. In other words, there are mechanisms for discipline within news organizations, if not within the profession as a whole.

In response to an audience question, Manoff stated that the development of a new paradigm of journalism is a process of social invention and would take place over several years, meaning that he could not provide a simple solution. He raised examples of news organizations that self-consciously changed their definition of news and maintained an objective methodology.

Gjelten remarked that news organizations will make decisions based on their bottom lines, and that this situation was unlikely to change. And he pointed out that one of the reasons journalists study conflict is because it may hold more explanatory power than reconciliation.

Rosen highlighted how journalists could report on events leading to reconciliation without slighting the truth. Gjelten questioned whether the current paradigm of journalism is a barrier, and pointed out that he felt no such barriers to his own work. Rosen replied that 'the only barrier is missing habits of reflection.'

In response to an audience question regarding how the news media choose which wars/conflicts to cover and which are ignored, Gjelten stated that he believed consumers of news determined the content of news products. Rosen pointed out that journalists are more interested in the conflicts between people than within people. Manoff remarked that this is part of the very important activity of 'framing' a story, fundamental to journalism.