Women building on a legacy
Journalists in Ukraine using a different lens to change how war is being reported
LOS ANGELES — Clarissa Ward interrupted her live TV report on Ukrainian refugees to help a distraught older man, then a woman, down a steep and explosion-mangled path, gently urging them on in their language.
A day later, Lynsey Addario, a photographer for The New York Times, captured an image of a Russian mortar attack’s immediate outcome: the bodies of a mother and her two children crumpled on a road, amid their suitcase, backpacks and a pet carrier.
The memorable reports illustrate the skill and gutsiness of female journalists serving as eyewitnesses to Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine and the way their presence — hard-won after overcoming ingrained notions of why women shouldn’t cover combat — has changed the nature of war reporting.
They cover the tactics of war, but give equal measure to its toll.
“People are so exhausted, they can barely walk,” Ward told viewers in her report.
The author of “You Don’t Belong Here,” a 2021 book that profiles three pioneering women who covered the Vietnam War, said there’s “absolutely no doubt that the reporting is what I would call more humane.”
Elizabeth Becker argues that Frances FitzGerald of the U.S., Kate Webb of Australia and Catherine Leroy of France were foundational to modern war reporting. Arriving in Southeast Asia on their own dime, without a staff job and little or no journalism experience, they broke the male grip on war reporting.”
Traditionally, “the coverage was the battlefield, which is important,” said award-winning journalist Becker, a Cambodian war correspondent in the 1970s. She said it took newcomer FitzGerald to ask, “‘OK, what does this mean in terms of the Vietnamese and the villages?’ ”
War reporting is “a sense of mission, it’s a sense of purpose, it’s a sense of being able to tell a story,” said Christiane Amanpour, the London-born chief international anchor for CNN. “And women are really very good at it, it seems.”
It’s also a matter of logic, said Holly Williams, the Istanbul-based correspondent for CBS News on assignment in Ukraine.
“I’m acutely aware of the fact that if you don’t tell women’s stories, you’re missing at least half of the picture,” said the Australian-born Williams, who has reported on conflicts in Asia and the Middle East.
“Often women do have a different perspective on war, and for a long time that was not really at the forefront of a lot of coverage,” Ward said.
Many male colleagues also contribute nuanced reporting, as ABC News veteran Martha Raddatz and others noted. But Raddatz recalls a not-so-distant time when men tended to “love the equipment, love the airplanes.”
Ward and other female journalists routinely tip their cap to their predecessors and praise recent trailblazers.
“I think my generation and myself, we were perhaps the last line of the rare woman foreign correspondent,” Amanpour said. In every form of media it’s “exploded into a very female friendly profession.”