I know press/reporters aren’t the direct targets of aggressors, and they don’t take up arms, but how do they manage to stay safe while reporting close to the front lines? Why wouldn’t the aggressors target them to reduce reporting of atrocities, if the aggressors are willing to kill anyways?
Edit: thanks for the responses, everyone. I wasn’t aware of how it really is.
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Other than being marked as noncombatants which *should* discourage enemy combatants from attacking them…
They don’t. They often have escorts that help protect them, but it’s basically like any other soldier. They try really hard not to be in the direction of bullets.
>how do they manage to stay safe while reporting close to the front lines?
They try to stay out of active combat areas or at least the direct line of fire. They aren’t always successful – wartime journalists do end up as collateral damage.
>Why wouldn’t the aggressors target them to reduce reporting of atrocities.
It does happen sometimes, but there is a general agreement amongst nations that certain people are off-limits for direct attack – journalists, aid workers, non-combatants, etc. Targetting non-combatants – including journalists – is a war crime. Of course, war crimes are generally only enforceable if you lose…
At the end of it all, it’s just a gentleman’s agreement – I won’t kill your journalists because I don’t want you killing mine.
They do not always stay safe. Journalists do die in war, mostly accidentally but sometimes on purpose. News organizations have been equipping journalists with lots of tools to send back live recordings either using the cell phone network or the satellite network. This does mean that news may quickly be sent out of a war zone. But in general journalists have to try to stay safe on their own. They tend to not be right at the fighting and if fighting breaks out around them they take cover where it is safe. It can help attaching themselves to military units as this means the enemy have someone more important to aim at while the journalists get into cover. However other times it is best to stay with the civilians as they are less likely to be targeted. It all depends on what is safest in the situation while still putting the journalist in a position to report back any important news.
They often don’t stay safe. 50 – 90 Journalists are killed each year with many more injured.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/266229/number-of-journalists-killed-since-1995/
They don’t always stay safe. Many of them have died over the years. Robert Capa, arguably the most famous war photojournalist of all time, took photos in a number of wars, including WW2 where he landed on Omaha Beach and took 11 very famous photos. He was killed while reporting on the First Indochina War.
If they’re like Bill O’Reilly they’ll not even be in the same country where the war is being fought and just pretend that they were. If they want the “good stuff” then they’ll be right in the thick of it and bullets, artillery shells, bombs, etc don’t care who they are.
Besides the obvious “they don’t often stay safe” answer, there’s also the fact that they wear visible gear to show them as non-combatants, usually a bright blue vest and helmet. There’s little to gain in targeting them directly, so their casualties mostly come from collateral damage.
>Why wouldn’t the aggressors target them to reduce reporting of atrocities, if the aggressors are willing to kill anyways?
Besides the other answers, targeting non-combatants is not a great way to spend your time and ammo while in the war zone. The guy in the blue vest and a Canon camera poses no danger to you. The guy in camo with a cannon does. While the latter are around, focusing too much on the former would be stupid.
Infantry in active fighting deal 4 kinds of non-combatants that are different kinds of problems for them:
– Civilians who live there or inadvertently wander into the fire zone
– Scouts & Spies
– Prisoners of war
– Civilian Journalists/Reporters, who have been around in war zones for at least 200 years
Armies do not wish to kill them, but to get them out of the fire zone and then deal with them as is appropriate for each. This is difficult because soldiers have to be taken out of action to accomplish this.
But often there are casualties and fatalities among those non-combatants.
Many reporters have died in active war zones. That continues to be true today.
>How does the press/reporters stay safe while openly reporting in war zones
They often don’t, they’re very often collateral damage, the ones that have made a long standing career of it, imo are a mix of very insane, very lucky, and very smart. I don’t think any one or combination of two would be enough to keep you alive for long.
>I know press/reporters aren’t the direct targets of aggressors
Sometimes they are a lot of times they aggressors just have other things to pay attention to, some like having the journalists there, every war has different mindsets, if they feel they’re doing the right thing, it’s probably not going to bother them that someone is there to report on it
I highly recommend looking into and reading up on James Nachtwey, one of my personal idols in the photography world, I think he’s the perfect blend of the three I mentioned previously. There are a few documentaries on his work, and in one he spoke about standing with other photographers and the guy next to him fell over dead from a stray bullet. He’s brought back photographs of conflicts and atrocities that *have* pushed people to drinking and depression, and he suffers through it, because someone needs to.
“Good night, and good luck” was originally the sign off of CBS News’ Edward R Murrow, and he started it doing radio during WWII.
It was a message to the other war journalists, at least the good luck part. He kept it as he entered peacetime TV in the 50s, because civilians also connected with it (so much Keith Olbermann brought it back when he was a nightly MSNBC talking head circa 2000).
They hope that they know enough to avoid bullets (or blitzes or grenades or drone strikes) and hope that when their knowledge fails, luck won’t. And that the dozens of journalists from many nations and from “competing” media outlets who are in the same general mess today will also keep ahead enough on data to not be down to depending on luck.
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