Does he really need to be here?

Also published March 18, 2010, in J-Source magazine.

By Claude Adams

Trauma wasn’t a big issue for journalists 32 years ago when Unit 2 of the Three Mile Island nuclear facility in Pennsylvania suffered a partial core meltdown. As I remember it, we were “spooked” by the fact that if we were accidentally radiated, we’d never know it until our hair started to fall out weeks later.

That produced its share of gallows humor at the time. As did my anxiety when my flight out of Harrisburg back to Washington took me over a TMI cooling tower just as it belched a huge cloud of steam. Was it a radioactive cloud? What was the pilot thinking? Was I doomed?

I remember worrying what effect this flyover might have on my ability to produce children, but the subsequent arrival of Patrick (1981) and Ariel (1987) put those fears to rest.

They were heady, stupid days. Most of the journalists who converged on Dauphin County to cover that iconic nuclear accident knew almost nothing about reactors, relief valves, or radiation. We were ignoramuses eager to produce some disaster porn. Science was not our strong point. The most common question in the media scrums was “What’s a millirem?” (Answer: It’s one-hundredth of a Sievert.) We’d all seen The China Syndrome, so we were all waiting for the molten uranium to burn its way through the earth’s crust and initiate the Countdown to Armageddon. Meanwhile, we listened to the lies and evasions of the plant operators, and wrote the obfuscatory stories that created more confusion than clarity for our readers.

I remember one day, desperate for fresh copy, a few us drove out to farm country to see the cows. We’d been told that cows react to unnatural events by turning away from the source of trouble. So we found a farmer’s field where most (but not all) of the cows were facing away from the TMI cooling towers. That was enough for a provocative photograph and a few chilling paragraphs with a catchy headline: “What do the cows know that we don’t?”

Of course none of this is funny today, as we watch the unfolding of the Japanese triple-threat: quake followed by tsunami followed by reactor crises. Reporters are better versed today in science and technology, as well as how to act in dangerous places. But still, some serious questions remain.

The Pack Moves In

Like, what are all those journalists doing there in the first place? Are they really necessary, or do they just get in the way? What are they telling us that we don’t already know? The stampede of foreign journalists into Japan in the days after the tsunami baffled some correspondents already there.

Dan Chung, a video-journalist for The Guardian, was in Japan’s disaster zone 36 hours after the 8.9 earthquake struck. He left during the first radiation scare. “We were the first wave in and we were getting the hell out of Dodge. And the second wave (of foreign media) were just coming in. It was strange. I guess they were there to cover the meltdown.” (A podcast of Chung’s experiences can be found here.)

Of course, if there were a meltdown, nobody would get within 100 km of the nuclear plant at Fukushima. Even as it was, there was little or no access to the main disaster area, so most of the second wave of visiting journos never even left Tokyo, with its 24-hour communication, abundant food and accommodation, and best of all, no threat of radiation.

Even for those intrepid one-man crews like Chung who got into the disaster zones early, news-gathering was nightmarishly difficult and ultimately without much point. Almost all of Chung’s 20-hour working day was consumed by logistics—fuel, food, power and finding Internet connections—which left barely two or three hours for real work.

And then, most of the still pictures and video he shot were superfluous. Chung says he “couldn’t compete” with Japanese crews on the ground and in helicopters, or with the incredible Japanese amateur video that was already being transmitted around the world.

Finally, there was the simple problem of communication. Chung couldn’t speak Japanese, and even with a translator, survivors didn’t want to talk to him.

“I kept asking myself, what the hell are you doing, and how do you do it differently?”

Planting the Flag

Those questions are mostly rhetorical. They answer themselves. In his heart, Chung knows very well why he was there, spending thousands of dollars of his boss’ money on a noble but unrewarding exercise. He was in Japan because The Guardian wanted him to be there so they could say they had somebody on the ground. (Radio France were notable for their decision to put safety ahead of ego, and pull most of their journalists out of Japan when the reactors started leaking.)

Disaster coverage on this scale is all ego for large news organizations. It’s ego on steroids. Stories like Japan offer almost no opportunity for original, enterprise reporting. They’re a showcase for your marquee correspondents, who are parachuted in and whose job it is to put a face (or a byline) on an already-familiar story. It’s a practice called “establishing presence”--like planting one's flag at the North Pole: Today we are here (and tomorrow we’ll be gone.) The pictures these correspondents are fronting from Tokyo are the same pictures, and the same information, that have been spinning through the CNN, BBC and Al-Jazeera news cycle for hours.

Just as Operation Desert Storm in Kuwait, 1990, was covered out of Washington, so too Japan, 2011, could have been covered perfectly well out of Vancouver or Toronto. All the images and human drama and analysis and graphics and voice clips are flowing down the pipeline, 24 hours a day, and all of them can be perfectly packaged at home. (Disclosure: I tried to cover Desert Storm for the CBC from a hotel in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, but ended up spending much of my time in a bomb shelter with a gas mask on.)

“We owned the story yesterday,” was how the senior executive of one Canadian network greeted the first-day coverage of the disaster. In fact, nobody on this side of the Pacific “owned” it. It wasn’t owned. At best, it was creatively appropriated, re-packaged and disseminated. The real owners of the story are the people who lived and died through the disaster, who used the social media to deliver the images, and who continue to risk their lives in the rubble and the reactors to mitigate its effects. Plus those brave Japanese journalists who got the first pictures out on March 12.

Who Owns What?

Maybe the time has come for new, lean, fast-reaction kind of disaster journalism. Small, highly-mobile, self-contained units of intrepid people like Dan Chung who are able to access a disaster area within hours, and send back information, pictures and audio to a data pool that everyone can access. We have to accept the ego-deflating fact that there are few scoops in catastrophes. We have to give up the idea that we can “own” stories of chaos.

This kind of mindset is not likely to be embraced soon by our corporatised, celebretised media, so I guess we will continue sending journalists into trouble areas, and hope they muddle their way through with the minimum of risk and trauma.

If so, they should all read a guide prepared by Yoichi Shimatsu, a former editor with the Japan Times Weekly. His guide was commissioned by the Dart Centre for Journalism and Trauma, and it has some good crisp ideas on how to gird yourself for life in a nuclear disaster zone. He also tells you what to pack: Things like small units of currency, the right camera phone, travel insurance (for that emergency helicopter ride to the hospital) and plenty of throwaway raincoats and face masks.

My favorite piece of advice is: Don’t be afraid to act like a “horse’s arse” at official press conferences. “The press handlers play dirty, and never forget it,” Shimatsu advises. So ask the tough questions and expose the denials and excuses.

In other words, if you absolutely have to be there, then at least find a way to make a difference.

Forget the "Canadian angle"

Published in J-Source on Feb. 25, 2010

By Claude Adams

Last night (Feb. 24) after a tumultuous day in Libya, all three Canadian networks--CBC, CTV and Global-- decided that the prime story of the day was NOT an African people's brave and bloody struggle for freedom, but rather how that revolution is inconveniencing Canadians. CTV led with higher gasoline prices at the pump: CBC and Global opened their shows with reports from Rome, about how difficult it was for Canadians to leave Libya.

Ironically, a woman interviewed at a gas station by CTV put things in perspective: "What's going on in Libya is much more serious than spending an extra three dollars on a tank of gas."

But that was a perspective clearly not shared by the lineup editors at Canada's most important broadcast news outlets. We may be living in a global village, but when it comes to broadcast priorities, it seems, we are still a collection of villages where parochial self-interest comes first, and the state of the world second. "Has anybody here been raped and speak English?" are the words that late Edward Behr had the typical British correspondent asking as he landed in an African civil war. "Are the Canadians okay?" our networks are asking today. "Okay, now what else happened?"

Of course, there are practical concerns here. In foreign news reporting, the messenger is often just as important as the message. None of the three Canadian networks had a correspondent inside Libya; they hadn't "established presence.” If the CBC's Carolyn Dunn, for example, had managed to reach Benghazi or Tripoli and send out a first-hand account of what was happening there, she would likely have led the show. Instead, it was Adrienne Arsenault first from Rome with the story about the belabored Canadians, and Dunn second at the Libyan/Tunisian border. The stark pictures and events inside Libya came third, in a report from Washington. The deployment of your network's marquee reporters abroad is always a factor in designing a newscast. (When I worked for The National years ago, they would rush to get me to a foreign capital so I could file a report from the ground, even if I hadn’t cleared my baggage yet. The news desk would feed me information, so I could sound authoritative the moment I touched down. That’s “establishing presence.”)

At CTV yesterday, the thinking (I suspect) was even more pragmatic. Everybody knew what was going on in Libya, thanks to the 24-hour news cycle, so why not do a story on what was really worrying Canadians: how much is that darn revolution going to cost me at the gas pump? The hottest news, like politics, is always local. Or so the thinking goes. (I remember a news director telling me: "News is what people are talking about on the bus to work. Nothing more, nothing less." I suppose that's why we're better informed about Kim Kardashian than North Korea.)

News executives will argue that the hierarchy of stories in the first ten minutes of a newscast doesn't really matter, as long as they are in some way linked to the main story. I don't agree. A newscast should be a reflection of what we really care about as an audience, as a society. Do I really care more about the Canadian oil worker trying to get home, than about the Libyan citizen being pursued by armed mercenaries? And if I do, should a public broadcaster cater to that blinkered sentiment?

Yes, yes, I know that news today is omnipresent, and that I can find out all I need to know about Libya on the CBC's website and on radio and on Google News, anytime I want it. But still, the top newscasts are the prism through which many people view the world, and how the networks behave as gatekeepers tells us something about their values, what they deem significant. Is it too much to insist on a sense of proportionality?

When I taught broadcast journalist a few years ago, we used to play the Lineup Game. I would collect a synopsis of all the stories from the night before, from all the prominent English-language TV newscasts in Canada, the US and the UK, and I would put them up on a board. Then I would ask the students to act as lineup editors, to design their own 22-minute newscasts from all the available stories, based on their own beliefs of what mattered.

In almost every case, the shows they created gave greater weight to strong international stories, with less weight to the purely Canadian-angle ones. I told them this flew in the face of marketing dogma--where local interest always trumps global interest. A downtown shooting will almost always attract more local buzz, and thus more eyeballs, than a ferry sinking in Bangladesh. The students didn't care about these algorithms of relative importance. "These are the kinds of newscasts I would watch," they said about their shows. (Implicit in that was the obvious message: "We don't, and won't, watch the others.") I'm not certain they were telling the truth. But I did find it interesting that their shows most closely resembled BBC newscasts.

Incidentally, these students are precisely that cohort of Canadians that is abandoning traditional newscasts in great numbers. Maybe there's a lesson here.

Aristide and the Globe and Mail

Feb. 4, 2011

The polarizer

I find it curious that the Globe’s editorial board would urge the continued exile of former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, even as it applauds the efforts of the Egyptian people to determine their own political future (Return Of A Polarizer – Feb. 3). You call him “unwelcome.” Surely not to the Haitian people, who elected him twice in a democratic vote. But you got one thing right. Mr. Aristide is indeed a polarizer. His “pole” is Haiti’s poor and dispossessed – the people who voted for him then lost him in an international coup.

Claude Adams, Surrey, B.C.

Noted in the Canadian Haiti Action Network newsletter.

The Forgotten Hostage

Another version of this story was published in J-Source on Jan. 11, 2011, and in The Tyee

By Claude Adams

In her final hostage video, in March 2009, Bev Giesbrecht of West Vancouver, her voice breaking, says this: “Either the Pakistani government or my own country, somebody’s got to move now, because my life is going to be over . . . Responsibility of this will be clearly on somebody’s shoulder. I’m pleading with you, please save my life.”

The terror is etched in her face. She clearly feared the worst from her Taliban captors—a grisly videotaped beheading. But that never happened. Instead, according to an Indian newspaper, Bev Giesbrecht died of a “prolonged illness” in October, 2010, while still a hostage. That’s 19 months after her video appeal, 19 months in which a Canadian citizen, working as a self-styled journalist, lingered in fear and illness in Taliban hands.

We couldn’t, or wouldn’t, save her. And the Canadian media paid only perfunctory attention to her plight. She was a Page 5 story, an after-thought. Giesbrecht got nowhere near the attention of two other Canadian women who were kidnapped by Islamic insurgents, Mellissa Fung and Amanda Lindhout, during this same period. Both were subsequently released.

Clearly, Giesbrecht was a complicated story, an anomaly. A woman who, in mid-life, suddenly converts to Islam, sells everything she owns, loses most of her friends, says nice things about the Taliban, and flies in the face of government policy. She calls herself a journalist, and ventures into one of the most dangerous places on earth—the tribal regions of Pakistan—looking for insurgents to film. Imagine that: a 95-pound middle-aged chain-smoking single woman, taking on the Taliban with nothing more than a camera, an attitude and quotations from the Koran!

She must have been crazy, or suicidal. At least, that’s what her critics were saying. “She made her Muslimah bed,” goes one Internet chat room comment. “Let her lie in it.” Vancouver journalist and author Terry Glavin was even harsher: “Batshit crazy play-acting,” he blogged.

But she wasn’t crazy, or play-acting. Her close friends, and people who worked with her in the field, say she was aggressive and opinionated and tireless, but perfectly sane—qualities that made her something of a phenomenon in B.C. publishing circles in the 1980s and 90s. As she described herself in her website: “I am not a ‘terrorist,’ a fanatic or mentally unbalanced. On the contrary, I am a level-headed, capable woman, a humanitarian and a contributing member of society.”

Her close friend, Glen Cooper, said she adopted Islam as a way of accessing a culture that she believed was misunderstood in the West. He says she wanted to help us to understand militant Islam better. A quixotic mission, maybe, and even foolhardy, but not without a certain nobility. “She was the bravest person I ever knew,” Cooper says.

Phil Rees, a British filmmaker who worked with her in Pakistan, told me Giesbrecht was “trying to give voice to people who she felt were not getting equal say in the swing of things. . . . She wanted to make films.” Her work appeared on Al-Jazeera, and Channel 4 in the UK. When she was captured, she was working on story she hinted would be a sensation in West.

But to the Pakistani government, according to journalists in Peshawar, she was seen as meddlesome Westerner-in-a-hijab consorting with the enemy, and they did little or nothing to help her.

How did this hostile attitude get in the way of Canadian efforts to secure her release? We don’t know, because Ottawa is saying nothing about her case, and neither is the RCMP, which was tasked with negotiating with her Taliban captors. Officially, they will maintain that silence until Giesbrecht’s death is confirmed. And, given the geography of where she was held, that could be a long time.

All we do know for sure is that Ottawa held firm to its uncompromising policy of not paying ransom money to kidnappers. Politically, that makes sense. But it’s a policy that needs to be examined from a humanitarian point of view: Maybe other concessions could have been offered, enough for the kidnappers to save face. Or why couldn’t some ransom money have been channeled quietly through private groups or individuals? (Lindhout was freed with private donations of $1 million.)

And there’s a good chance Giesbrecht could have been freed for far less than a million dollars. The Pakistani interpreter who was kidnapped with her (and released) said her captors were despairing of ever getting any money for her. She was ill, losing her sight, and becoming a burden. They were ready to let her go. A Pakistani-Canadian journalist who traveled to Peshawar told me that the word on the street was that a “few thousand dollars” would have been enough to secure her freedom.

Why didn’t this add some impetus to negotiations? Again, nobody will say. But it begs the question: how determined were the efforts to rescue an imperiled Canadian on foreign soil when that citizen was a vocal critic of government policy?

There is a slim chance that Giesbrecht may, in fact, still be alive. But if she’s not, simple compassion requires that she be mourned, and that we are given an explanation of why she could not be rescued.