Report conflict without bias, journalist urges
Canadian reporters should be on the ground covering both sides of the war against the Islamic State and this country’s involvement, veteran Canadian war reporter Kathy Gannon said.
A longtime correspondent for The Associated Press, Gannon was named Thursday as the winner of the World Press Freedom Award. The award is given out annually by the Canadian Committee for World Press Freedom, in honour of World Press Freedom Day on May 3, with support from UNESCO.
Last April, Gannon was seriously injured, and her colleague, photographer Anja Niedringhaus, was killed when an Afghan police officer sprayed their car with machine-gun fire as they prepared to cover the national election.
On Thursday, Gannon spoke about threats to press freedom at home and abroad, and she warned that too many reporters often fall over the “good versus evil precipice” in war coverage.
During the Afghan war, she said, “the Taliban was perceived as evil, rather than as a combatant in a conflict.” In an interview, she said that kind of binary framing is happening again with the war against ISIL.
“Don’t go into a story saying, ‘I’m going to show what kind of monsters they are.’ Just report what they’re doing and let the public decide that they are monstrous,” she said.
In order to portray the conflict accurately, reporters need to show what Gannon called the “local footprint.” That means accepting the risks and being on the ground despite the difficulty in gaining access to both sides of the conflict, she said.
On one hand, ISIL has made it clear with brutal tactics and targeting of journalists that it doesn’t want the press to have access to its territory. But on the other, the Canadian government has also refused journalists access to its military on the ground.
“In principle, press freedom is widely accepted. In practice, not so much,” she said.
Government restrictions on reporters are all part of an effort to “stage-manage the consequences of war,” she said, adding it happened to her in Afghanistan and continues today.
When Canada began its bombing campaign against ISIL in October, the government barred reporters from the Kuwaiti airfield it was using to launch its strikes.
“If the government wants to stonewall me, that’s their business. Then you say, ‘Screw you,’ and you find another way to tell the story,” she said.
Despite being shot last year, Gannon says she plans to return to Afghanistan and continue her work.
“It’s not about being an advocate or an adversary; it’s about telling the stories of the people who lived through these conflicts,” she said.