The stubborn journalist
The Frontline Club is easy to miss, unless you have Google Maps or someone who knows precisely where it is located guiding you to it. This media club near London’s Paddington Station serves as a meeting place for journalists who report from the frontlines. Steadfastly committed to the freedom of the press and freedom of expression, the club is also a venue for films, talks, workshops, documentaries and sharing stories.
Journalists back from conflict zones often come here to narrate their stories to others who can relate to what they have seen, experienced and felt. For some, this place is like a bridge that can help them find their way back into the life they left to enter a world whose story needed to be told. It is also the keeper of their own stories, some of which speak from the walls and cabinets of the Frontline club room through the personal items displayed unobtrusively. These are largely war-reporting memorabilia — a conflict cameraman’s mobile phone with a sniper’s bullet still lodged in it; a piece of clothing a journalist was wearing when he was killed on the job; or some lucky possession that stopped a bullet and saved another’s life.
Sitting here, surrounded by these memories of those who died or risked their lives in the pursuit of a story, it is difficult not to wonder why journalists do what they do. It is also difficult not to appreciate what they do. More so in the present times, when the frontline has shifted. It has come closer home, even right into the newsroom.
This year, so far, 40 journalists have been killed for their work — not all of them on the frontline as we conventionally understand it. This number comes from Reporters Without Borders, an international non-profit organisation that promotes and defends press freedom. Reporters Without Borders gives out these figures only after decisively establishing that the journalists were killed (or imprisoned) in connection with their work. Till June 28, with four journalists done to death, India shared the second position with Mexico, next only to Afghanistan where 11 journalists were killed this year. The June 28 Capital Gazette newsroom massacre in the United States, in which six journalists were shot dead, pushed India and Mexico to the third position.
Forget the absence of work-life balance, journalism is not even a safe, secure profession. It never has been. So then why do journalists do what they do, especially in a world that does not seem to appreciate what they do? Unlike a soldier, who fights in war or defends the borders, a journalist can never tell who the enemy is, who will fire the bullet, or will run him/her over (which is what happened with three Indian journalists in March this year). Our experience with Gauri Lankesh and Shujaat Bukhari’s killings shows that a journalist remains under attack even after death.
Vulnerable as he or she is, a journalist does what he or she does for the thrill of it, yes, but also because someone has to do it. Someone has to get into the muck to expose it. And then if some of that muck also gets hurled at him or her, well, then that’s the occupational hazard he or she is willing to risk. Those who call journalists presstitutes are simply those who would rather not have the muck exposed.
But a journalist is also human, just like a soldier is. He or she too worries for his or her life and family, just like a soldier on the border does (though the jingoists would rather not admit that). Yet, he or she soldiers on. We saw that the day after Bukhari, the editor of Kashmir Times, was killed. His team brought out the newspaper the next day. “Shujaat silenced,” read their headline. The newspaper continues to speak out. The very evening they lost six colleagues to a maniacal shooting in the newsroom of Capital Gazette, the staff at the newspaper worked out of a car park to get the next day’s edition out. “We are putting out a damn paper tomorrow,” tweeted one of their reporters. And in Malta, after journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia was killed in October 2017, 45 journalists from 15 countries worked in secret to complete and publish her investigation on corruption and money-laundering in the archipelago.
The frontline has indeed shifted. But journalists aren’t shying away from it. They are a stubborn breed, after all, driven by the conviction that an informed world is a better world.