Three journalists who have filed stories from Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait and an expert who specializes in keeping journalists safe in violence-torn regions of the world will participate in a panel discussion at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
"Surviving the Assignment: 21st Century War Reporting and the Age of Blackwater" will take place from 5 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 23, in room 150 in the Eaton Humanities Building. The CU-Boulder School of Journalism and Mass Communication is sponsoring the event, which is free of charge and open to the public.
Worldwide, more than 100 journalists were killed on the job in the first six months of this year, and more than 220 have died in Iraq since March 2003, said journalism Dean Paul Voakes.
"Journalists take huge risks to get the news out to the rest of us. I'm glad we'll have an opportunity to learn more about how they can be made safer on these important but dangerous assignments," he said.
Panelists will include Tim Crockett, executive director of AKE Ltd., the leading worldwide company providing war-zone security for CNN, the Wall Street Journal, Al Jazeera, Fox News and other major media outlets.
The other panelists will be CNN military correspondent Alex Quade, former ABC News Senior National Security correspondent John McWethy and CU-Boulder graduate student and Institute for War and Peace Reporting reporter and editor Mariwan Hama-Saeed.
The group will talk about changes in press coverage during recent conflicts, what can be done to mitigate dangers to journalists and whether security measures hinder reports from the field.
Quade has been embedded with every branch of the U.S. military in Iraq and in other combat zones around the world. McWethy was in the Pentagon the day a hijacked passenger plane hit it on Sept. 11, 2001, and was the network's lead correspondent covering the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
"In my 25 years of covering America's conflicts, we were pretty much on our own in many of these war zones. If we were not with the U.S. military, we had no security except hired guns from local clans that we arranged on the spot," McWethy said.
Crockett, who will be on the CU-Boulder campus as a Hearst Professional in Residence, has been preparing journalists with CNN and other media outlets for assignments in dangerous regions of the world since 2002.
"In very few colleges and universities do they tell journalism students, 'You are going to be in dangerous situations,' and we're not just talking about international conflict zones, but right here in the United States," Crockett said. "The panel will hopefully open everyone's eyes to some of the real risks journalists face, sometimes on a daily basis, and more importantly, what can be done to get the story safely."
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