by Dish Staff
George Packer unpacks what the world lost in the murder of James Foley, and continues to lose as journalism in the Syria-Iraq war zone becomes ever more dangerous:
Among the many reasons to mourn Foley’s death is the loss of his reporting, and of reporting in general, from Syria. News of the civil war from Western media organizations has been dwindling as security has deteriorated, and it is now likely to dry up. Local Syrian reporters face an even greater threat. The Committee to Protect Journalists says that at least eighty journalists have been kidnapped since the start of the war and at least seventy have been killed, almost all of them Syrians, and almost all in 2012 and 2013. So far this year, the confirmed number of journalists killed is down to six, Foley being the most recent. (Solid information is increasingly difficult to get.) This cannot be because working conditions in Syria have improved. One likely explanation is that few reporters, and even fewer who reach Western audiences, are still covering the war. This would be disastrous under any circumstances, but it is especially calamitous now.
He also laments how thoroughly the chattering class has politicized the crisis:
The debate about ISIS almost automatically becomes a debate about who’s to blame for it: who started the Iraq War, who withdrew from it, who supported Nouri al-Maliki, who didn’t support the Syrian rebels, who helped to create ISIS, who failed to see ISIS coming, whose policies turned Muslims into jihadists, who has a right to say anything at all. These arguments are a sweet substitute for the thankless task of formulating honest answers to the questions raised by ISIS, which would inevitably mean advocating morally dubious actions with no certainty of a good outcome, as well as having to repudiate many of one’s earlier views.
Reflecting on his own experience as a war reporter, Tom Peter concludes that collecting facts that will only be doubted, disbelieved, and repackaged into partisan discourse is no longer worth risking one’s life for:
Covering wars for a polarized nation has destroyed the civic mission I once found in journalism. Why risk it all to get the facts for people who increasingly seem only to seek out the information they want and brand the stories and facts that don’t conform to their opinions as biased or inaccurate? And without a higher purpose, what is a career as a reporter? It may count among the so-called “glamor jobs” sought after by recent graduates, but one careers website has listed newspaper reporting as the second worst job in America, based on factors such as stress, pay, and employment uncertainty; toiling as a janitor, dishwasher, or garbage collector all scored better. Even if you love the work, it’s hard not to get worn down by a job that sometimes requires you to risk life and limb for readers who wonder if maybe you suffer all the downsides and hazards just to support some hidden agenda.
The Dish 