Maria is a lecturer at the University Department of politics and International Relations and her most recent book, even though she has been out for a short. Lack of time is a book on work correspondence and the research she has done over a number of years because of her interest in foreign conflicts in various parts of the world, so she will share with you today her most recent work interviewing correspondence. Thank you. [applause]. Hello. Thank you so much. Thank you for coming. I am deeply grateful for what youve done. I see one of my favorite people in the world room and that makes extort fairly happy. Before i talk about this book, reporting from the danger zone frintline journalists, their jobs, and an increasingly perilous future and i have to add the type is really small, so if you are my age, you have to get extra thick classes. Extra thick glasses. It is about frontline journalists, work correspondence early, but also people who report on authoritarian government, organized crime and what they have to go through to get the story, why we get the information we get, what are the considerations that they make in order to look into these situations and in the end, how they may rested from censorship and all the things that going with that information struggle, which i sometimes call that information war, so that we put it into context first. This grew out of both my phd dissertation in my first book. The first book was called kill the messenger and i was interested in understanding with that whole of media had been in all kinds of conflicts and all kinds of situations around the world, so what i concluded from that was very 11 case studies and we like to talk about rwanda , the used be attached to one another with similar dynamics and some were ethnic groups and they both had genocidal history, but after the genocidal rwanda in which like 800,000 people were brutally slaughtered, a lot of International Organizations went in to try to prevent that from happening again there. They set up media that would act as an ethical screen to change the messages, so instead of having this sort of hate message that you probably heard about in rwanda, which demonized the people, actually galvanized people to help annihilate a group of people in a multiple awful ways, but in brunei what they did was they change the whole equation. They humanized the efforts and try to help people understand what the roots of conflict work. They refuse to air statements from leaders that called for more killing, sort of hanging what you see sometimes hes said she said. Instead they said no, sorry wont put that on the radio and please come back with something that is construction constructive. It did help to change the dynamics work it worked for a while. Baroody is a bit conflicted again took the first thing they went after was the media, of course to change those messages, but so im interested in ethical journalism and im interested in what is ethical journalism, what is the impact it makes, why do we get the stories we get and these were all factors that went into my interviewing about 32 journalists who do this kind of dangerous work. So lets see, where is a good place to begin here . Wars have changed. War makers have sort of two planes in which they i don; right . The real physical battle, but then there is also the framework or information war where they went to persuade as many people as i can that their site is right and the other side is wrong. It is broadening an audience as much as they can, telling their story the way they want to tell it. Its a essentially their version of propaganda on each side, so wars have change in a lot of ways. 41, they are not clearcut. We dont have one state versus another much anymore. We have these messy, chaotic conflicts and that makes it hard for journalists to maneuver within these conflict zones. It makes it unclear with territory they are in and who is controlling the territory, but then there is also the communication factor, which has also changed war and conflict and part of that is this thing that was supposed to the umicrosigns the world; right . Bring about all of these wonderful things called the internet. The internet has done some wonderful thing; right . It has democracy i in a lot of ways. Ngos can now communicate with people all over the world. People who witness things can be journalists and communicate, so its amazing array of things that the internet has given to us. But, at the same Time Internet has also become a means for war makers, level groups, terrorist groups to communicate and so what happens to journalists, ethical journalists who want to go in there and tell what they see as the truth, something that was missed, a way they see the situation accurately. As an example of something that i came from the book about what these journalists do sometimes, some of you may have heard of maria who was killed a couple years ago in syria, she had probably little who is at the bbc war in iraq during the first goal for when there were two sites of a story. There had been a bombing and that Iraqi Government said the us forces had killed civilians. The American Forces is said, no, we didnt. So, these two journalists went in and physically counted bodies and thats part of what an ethical journalists would do their going as a look, let me set the record straight. We will physically go there and tell our audiences with the reality is. So, with the internet and the people being able to use their own frames in their own propaganda and on this information, what use is a journalist . They are kind of in the way of that story. So, there were different phases of journalism. There were phases of journalism when journalists went in with their side of the conflict and in some cases were considered an officer of their side of the conflict. There was a phase in the 80s when there were a lot of rubble complex going on and journalists were able to go from one side to the other side and ask each side for their particular interpretation of what was going on. Why are you fighting . What are your concerns . That was perfectly okay with everyone because they needed the journalists to tell their story. So, they were not targets. Well, now they are in the way. Now they have there everyone has her own media and microphone , so this is why we have been seeing increasingly irrational killings in places such as syria. They dont want this neutral voice to come out and you know, maybe not so neutral with some of the things i found in the book. There is quite a bit that are not neutral because journalists are very much guided by what makes them human, there he managed, emotions, their deepest cares and concerns, their interests that drive this story gathering. So, without journalists, what happens . We get one side or the other, to conflicting sides. We dont know whats true. We dont know where to put our face and a so this is a troublesome kind of timing terms of those of us who both want to engage with our government in some democratic fashion, went to know what our government is doing for others, not always government these days, lots of privatized militaries and contractors and things like that going on, but then it is also for the policymakers that dont have information many times, so one of the journalists i entered interview, a guy named roy gutman was talking about how journalists missed the story in afghanistan and did not see the developments going on and did not report them and so then all of a sudden you had this sort of big problematic area. So, people cannot make decisions without information. So, whats happening today because it is so dangerous in parts of the world like syria, theres a lot of News Agencies refusing to send their journalists in. Donald trumps present is one that said we will not accept freelance material, so if you want to syria, dont come to us because they want to discourage people from going in and risking their lives. From getting their throats slit, so it creates sort of a dilemma; right . On one hand we want information and we want to know whats going on. On the other hand, if theyre not going to come out alive what good is it and this is something that journalists said over and over again. Some of this is still going on, but its interesting how they did. She is Syrian American, so she can play with greater. She is covered anyway. She is of syria and the dissent and muslim, so she has a fake id. I dont encourage this for the journalism students, but she was not the only one that uses a fake id, but she slips in and out of the checkpoint seamlessly at one point, she went to egypt, during the uprising and she met a canadian guy on the airplane and they got to talking and she said okay, you are going to sit in the front seat. I will sit in the back seat and they will ask you questions. Here is one place where sexism helped her. Because they did not even bother to ask her anything and they assumed she was his wife and she got in there and reported some of the best stories you could get out of egypt. So, these are some of the ways that the journalists operate. Many of them we do it by the rules. We get passes. We get them stamped by the appropriate group, whoever is in control of that area and we do it all legally as much as we can because that is our ticket out and gutman said he even had his past stamped once by isis, but he you know then pushes the ball up a bit more and more in a little bit more and then he is the guy that discovered the first discovery of the concentration camps in bosnia and wrote about it and this is just by charm offensive, getting in with his photographer, talking up the guards, giving them a little candy, you know, giving them some cigarettes. It apparently goes long way in many parts of the world. Then, seen in the background what they were not supposed to be seen, which was these guys getting their heads sheared like sheep, skinny, obviously had not eaten for a long time, malnourished, sick and so that was how they saw that there was something going on and he went to refugee camps and started asking people, asking people and found other people who had either escaped or had relatives that had been taken, so here you see the struggle; right . The government trying to control information. The journalists are trying to get the information, but within a certain umbrella of rules. I see Michael Parks back there who is in the book, by the way, and one of the things that Michael Parks said that out but was so important was the guys with the guns make the rules. Do you remember saying that, michael . Yeah, the guys with the guns make the rules, so you have to abide by certain number of roles and he did not all the time, by the way, like in south africa turkey sometimes did and sometimes didnt and sometimes got caught or so if i remember the story correct. He has not read the book, so he might be mad at me at this point but, that is just part of what happened. Sometimes the rules are little bit too unreasonable and the journalist is trying to get information out to the audiences the things that guide these journalists are often a commonly want to tell you something important, that they think is important, so the Syrian American journalist is one example i think of. You know, this is a country keep she cares deeply about, people she cares deeply about. She has enormous amounts of empathy for people, sympathy for people and she is truly upset and angry and saddened by what tapping and would like to see something happen to take care of the situation. Almost invariably, most of the journalists i talked to, this was on their mind like this is awful stuff and we want the world to ask. Most of them were very disappointed. Why isnt anyone do anything. The rest of them sort of resigned themselves into we are setting the story straight even if no one does anything. At least there is a record. That in another itself is a Public Service and remember alan little saying, in a democracy having that information is always better than not having the information and for my first book i argue, having Accurate Information can be light life or death. So, the other aspect of this is that local journalists and Foreign Correspondents have two different sets of competitions and about half of the interviewees the local correspondents who live in the region where the problems are. I was struck by an enormous amount encourage, first of all, in both parts to do this kind of work. The local journalists come of these are their friends, their families, their communities that are getting completely blown apart in many cases, so come all who is the editor of the daily newspaper in bosnia, he put that newspaper out every single day throughout that time. If the people needed to know what happened to to their loved ones, where do we get water, was the International Community going to do and he lost i can count five right now of his own journalists. Someone machine gun and sprayed his. He happened to to not be there, so he risk his life over and over again. He sent his family away, finally , and continue to work unable to communicate with them because who had a phone, but he felt like he had to. This was their duty, sense of duty was so important to get this information out. Another local journalists that i was really struck by is a gentleman in pakistan who discovered through his own informational signing finding documents and putting them together that Something Like half of the parliament had never paid their taxes. Different kind of a story than a Foreign Correspondent would cover; right . It something that matters to their local community and something that kind of outrageous and so then he started to write about the Intelligence Service in pakistan and how they were behaving improperly at best and he got kidnapped and he got tortured for at least a halfhour of torture and humiliated and ashamed and photographs taken and then dropped off an hour outside of islamabad where he lived and had to put himself back together again. You would think that would be discouraging; right . The guy to doing the work and his family were like can you please stop doing this in journalism thing now. We are little bit concerned that this is going to get us all into some trouble, but he said that there were several things that he did that he felt committed to his country. He was offered jobs in the United States, in britain, but he said this is my country and i would like to improve it. So, first of all in pakistan, its a little bit of a stigma to have gone through Something Like that. Its not like in the United States were you can go find your shrink, so he was dealing with himself. His friends were avoiding him and he said that he learned to focus on the presence present, so every time a fear would come up or the horror from the experience he would focus on the present and then he did a few other things amiss in for the journalism students. He practiced being so extraordinarily professional and generous with all of his with all of the people he was reporting on and the agencies he reported on, such that they liked him. They didnt come after him again , so he said you dont have you cannot misquote people. You dont have that luxury. Its a luxury to misquote people. It is not appropriate to be mean or rude. You tell the facts. You put it into context. You dont accuse people. You dont blame people, but you give them a bigger context and make a policy issue, a governance issue and if someone says i dont want to give you a quote, give them time. Give them two months if they need it and so he has managed to keep reporting on pakistan, still. How am i doing on time . Good. A very good. Some of the journalists were so discouraged that they wanted to leave journalism. Or just report on Something Else for a while. They had seen too much. They were guided, emotionally and guided by that lack of International Communitys response, so some of them actually that was part of the harm that was done was that we lost really good journalists. Through this trauma that they had endured, so the different kinds of trauma, of course. Four of them had been kidnapped, interviewees, but even of the ones that were kidnapped the things that were most traumatizing to them were not necessarily those things that happened to them. There were things like seeing peoples lives shattered, telling the story to me of this elderly couple living in a corner of a shelled out hotel having lost everything, not able to contact their family and asking the journalists, the bbc journalists, he was going to croatia and he said would you please look at my daughter and tell them we are okay. So, the journalist did that. He took the note to the daughter and the note said please no mommy and daddy are okay. Everything will be fine and we will sip tea together very soon. That was so got team to the journalist because he knew that they would not make it work they had written this generous notes and he delivered it to the daughter knowing in all reality it was very unlikely they would ever see their kids again. One of the things he pointed out was the guy was wearing a tight he said this was one of the things that was inspiring. The guy refused to take to let them take his dignity. They took every thing else, but he were that high, so these were just remarkable stories and remarkable lives that i heard from these people who i think are also remarkable people. Why do we get the stories we get . , its a lot of things. Access, access is key. Journalists are always negotiating this, so they ask for permission. Sometimes they get it and a sometimes they dont. If they dont get it, sometimes they try to go in any way. Many of the journalists i spoke to had snuck into the region. Some used gifts. I have a funny gift story. Another journalist who wont let me reveal who she is was always a custom to things like alcohol, pornography, cash into the luggage and at customs they take them out as part of the entrance fee. This time, they took the things out and then picked up her hair rollers and the guy said what is this and she said hair rollers and he said my wife like this. [laughter] hair rollers became the entrance fee. So, this is the first step in determining what it is and why we get the story. Sometimes you cant even get into see anyone see anything there is huge fast arrays of places they will never get to, so the second thing is journalists own interests matter so much and earlier when i said, this is a sense of sense of empathy, but also a sense