Although there is still no word from the captors of an American reporter being held hostage in Iraq, today's scheduled release of five Iraqi women in U.S. custody has been widely seen as a move towards securing the freedom of missing reporter Jill Carroll, Reuters reported yesterday.
Carroll had been working as a freelance reporter in Baghdad when she was abducted on Jan. 7. Her translator was killed in the assault.
Soon after, the kidnappers released a video of Carroll in custody and threatened to kill her by last Friday unless all female Iraqi prisoners being held by the U.S. were released.
U.S. forces are currently holding eight Iraqi women, and about 14,000 Iraqi men, according to The New York Times.
The kidnapper's deadline passed quietly last Friday. Carroll's abduction has underscored the risks reporters face abroad for students in AU's journalism program.
Bill Gentile, a School of Communication professor at AU, teaches students how to become foreign correspondents. Gentile spent years covering Central America's bloodiest conflicts and knows the dangers reporters in war-zones face.
Last year he spent two weeks embedded with a marine platoon in southern Iraq while shooting a segment for the PBS program "Now."
"Covering Iraq is like nothing I've ever covered before," Gentile said.
Central America was straightforward and relatively safe, he recalled. We were able to cross the battle lines to get both sides of the story.
"The region always had protagonists who were interested in getting their version of the story out in the U.S.," Gentile said, mainly because Washington supported many of the groups involved in the conflict, he added. That is "absolutely not true for Iraq
"My sense [is that the insurgents] view American journalists as cohorts of the invading forces," Gentile said.
Others reporters who have worked in Iraq agree.
Jackie Spinner, a Washington Post reporter, recently finished a series of media interviews recalling her 18 months covering Iraq.
As a reporter, "you are considered part of the occupation," Spinner recently told a class of journalism students from AU, GW and Howard Universities.
There never was a free press under Sadam Hussein, Spinner said, and Iraqis commonly believe the American press is part of the government.
Freelance reporters like Carroll faced additional challenges in Iraq that their colleagues working for large media outlets didn't, Spinner said.
"It's very difficult at this point to [freelance in Iraq]," she explained. "It's much, much easier coming from a major news organization."
The Post provides its reporters with security, housing and translators, Spinner said, but a freelance reporter must find all those on his or her own.
Coral Davenport, a master's journalism student in SOC, also understands the difficulties Carroll faced as a freelance reporter abroad.
Davenport spent almost two years freelancing for the Christian Science Monitor and other publications from Athens, Greece.
"You're living in a foreign country making your living as a writer," she said. "You can't afford to be precious, you can't afford to be scared.
"For the first year, you can't ever say no to anything." she said. "You have to be able to be a political analyst, feature writer and guide book writer.
"It's so hard just to keep yourself housed and fed," she added.
Like Carroll, Davenport graduated from university in Massachusetts and spent time working on a small town paper before moving abroad.
Freelance writing can be a way to jumpstart your career, Davenport said. It can get you into the big papers.
But if you get into trouble as a freelance reporter, you don't have the same protection as a staff writer, she said.
Editors will accept a freelancer's work because "it costs them nothing," Davenport said.
They don't have to pay the high cost of life insurance, housing or security for the reporter.
"It's just such a good deal for the newspapers," Davenport said.
By the end of 2005, 72 journalists and media workers had died in Iraq, according to Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based organization that works to protect press freedom worldwide.
The Vietnam War, which lasted from 1955 to 1975, resulted in the death of 63 journalists.
