Honor Those Who Die Keeping Us From Fatal Blindness

By Mort Rosenblum

PARIS - Scott Simon cut through the second-guessing on Libya with a few simple words:

“Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros tried to take photos to pierce our hearts and move us to care. It would honor them to pay attention not only to their pictures, but also the brave, grieving, and embattled people that they died to show us.”

Chris and Tim are the latest of so many journalists, over so many generations, who died trying to stay close enough to capture the complexity of humanity with a lens.

Reporters we’ve mourned went after words in the same way to show us faraway conflicts that, whether we realize it or not, shape all of our lives.

Imagine the world today if, before the Vietnam War and before others since then, we had heeded them instead of “pundits” who write from a distance and steer us wrong.

From the Hindi pandit, a pundit is a learned sage. Far more common, as my wordsmith friend Phil Cousineau notes, are puppets and panjandrums.

When Benghazi rose up, a little bunch of madmen found a way in. They reported what they saw: Qaddafi was about to unleash his dogs of war, and people would die in droves.

NATO jets based minutes away could have delivered the message they failed to deliver in 1991 when Serbs shelled Dubrovnik: Despots don’t get to shell their citizens. An attack then would have disabled Libyan aircraft, tanks and troop trucks before they could deploy. Bashar al-Assad in Syria, among others, would have taken note.

By the time France took the lead, and others joined in, tactics required a firm grasp of reality. We needed to hear from those brave, grieving, embattled people.

But the usual chorus drowned out much of the excellent eyewitness reporting and analysis from inside Libya.

On Sunday morning TV from Washington, I watched a guy in black leather opine at length, articulate but clueless. His website got a lot of hits; that made him an expert.

Even being there is not necessarily enough.

At one point, Geraldo Rivera, Fox News’ “Senior War Correspondent,” stood exposed on open ground, leaping around like a baboon, grimacing as gunfire popped in the distance. The headline said he was “dodging bullets.”

Bullets move fast; you can’t dodge them. If you draw fire, they can kill those working with you – including that Libyan driver heard pleading for some sense off-camera.

Grandstanding only dispels credibility. Few reporters who cover conflict call themselves war correspondents. The bang-bang part is just a piece of a bigger human story.

To fathom war -- and to avert it when we can -- we need wily old pros like Chris, Tim, and those we’ve buried before. They keep us from fatal blindness.

You can’t pay someone enough to do what they do; smack anyone who tells you they’re just after a thrill. Something deep drives each of them. And against all reason, others are anxious to join the ranks.

News organizations are morphing fast – into what, we can only guess. Budgets, salaries and job opportunities dwindle, yet never have so many kids been so eager to cover the world. They need our help.

Private aid is vital. Bad foreign policy emptied our treasury. So politicians cut funds needed to train fresh journalists to help us run a smarter world.

It is also vital to do as Scott Simon suggests: Honor those who try to pierce our hearts so we know that others’ bravery and grief should also be ours.

Journalism is a craft and a calling. The tools get fancier, but the basic challenges and responsibilities don’t change. The medium is immaterial, as are nationalities and genders. What matters – chip this on my tombstone – is the message.

At the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy, one blogger held that people care most about gossip. Getting it right is secondary; lawyers can sort that out.

Others argued that coverage is better than ever because so many people tweet and flash tidbits when news breaks, whether reporters are there or not. Up to a point.

As its title, my panel posed a question: “With new technology why do we still need to send reporters to cover stories in foreign countries?”

I answered it with a question of my own: If we can still ask that in today’s world, are we all out of our freaking minds?