Digest 03/21/2022

Fixers facing danger, reporting harassment within the newsroom, and more.

This week’s Study Hall Digest has been handed over to Courtney Tenz who has covered culture and conflict from Europe for over a decade.

---

OF FIXERS, FREELANCERS AND FOREIGN CORRESPONDENTS

(Trigger warning, some of these links are to stories about war crimes)

A debate on the role of fixers in war zones ignited last week after initial reports about journalists killed near Kyiv, Ukraine neglected to mention that 24-year-old Oleksandra Kuvshynova had died while working as a “consultant” for Fox News in an attack that also killed cameraman Pierre Zakrzewski and wounded on-screen personality Brent Hall. 

Fixers, traditionally underpaid local freelancers, serve as the eyes and ears of foreign correspondents and parachute reporters — finding sources, translating interviews, scouting locations — while receiving few benefits and protections beyond their day rate. While their work is essential to the stories we see coming out of Ukraine and other conflict zones, they rarely receive a byline; Kuvshynova’s example suggested that a fixer’s work can even be erased in death. And deaths, especially among local journalists, have become more common in war zones even though the targeting of civilians (as most “un-embedded” journalists are labeled) is considered a war crime.

Kuvshynova isn’t the only Ukrainian journalist to have died in the war thus far (Yevhenii Sakun died March 1 in the shelling of Kyiv’s TV tower) but we only learned her name after other English-speaking Ukrainian journalists tweeted about it. In a Twitter Spaces conversation shortly afterward, several women journalists pointed out that there may be a gendered element to her erasure while also noting that some of the foreign men reporting from Ukraine were undertaking risky actions that endangered themselves, their fixers, and civilians. At the same time, as there have been several reports of local journalists being detained, the question of fixer safety is raised. Is it better to remain anonymous while reporting in a conflict zone or to identify yourself as press, with whatever risks accompany that? 

Although the decision is ultimately an individual one, whether a reporter is foreign or local has, in the past, made enough of a difference to safety that some local journalists and fixers have had their bylines erased out of fear for their lives. And media outlets play some hand in the amount of attention their reporters receive after they go missing, dependent upon security assessments. Still, in at least one case in Ukraine, we are hearing markedly little about the detention of a reporter; independent news channel Hromadske has made it known they are worried about the safety of their reporter Viktoria Roshchina, who has been missing for days and is thought to be in Russian custody. It’s worth wondering if the relative silence among some journalists surrounding Roshchina’s detention isn’t because she is not reporting in English or for a foreign outlet.

While there’s a debate to be had about the gendered differences in conflict reporting (the work of photojournalist Lynsey Addario highlights that, as she has written about before; the greater access to the experiences of women and children she is afforded paints a different picture than the finely detailed images promoting military might and battlefield prowess), there’s also a discussion to be had about the hegemonic tendencies of US foreign reporting that relegates fixers and other local media to the background while highlighting American personalities on screen and treating its audience as unfamiliar with the rest of the world. 

While that sort of myopic worldview held by many foreign correspondents is nothing new, as historian Deborah Cohen points out in her new book, Last Call at the Hotel Imperial, it is one that is increasingly difficult to justify with our broader access to information about what is happening abroad. As Krithika Varagur wrote in her review of that book, the tendencies of post-war foreign correspondents of “accreting detail when you don’t have a clue what’s going on” remain in the 21st century and we’re none the better for it. 

Two Ukrainian AP reporters who covered the siege of Mariupol provide an example of how the opposite might work; by reporting in English about what is happening in their own country, they offered a difficult but necessary perspective that non-locals would struggle to achieve. Although there are reasons to be wary of suggesting a person’s nationality makes them better at storytelling from a war zone, there is also the added danger that being a local brings along with it. Today, we learned that two had to be evacuated, as their work had made them a target for capture.

---

THE ONLINE HARASSMENT OF TAYLOR LORENZ

For years now, we’ve been hearing about the harassment of women* journalists online. Reporters like Rana Ayyub have been on the receiving end of death and rape threats for over five years. The OSCE dedicated an office to the study of the phenomenon. UNESCO has held conferences on it and recently launched an essay collection full of personal stories by women facing harassment. 

But the topic’s once again in the spotlight after Taylor Lorenz spoke about her own experiences being doxxed, impersonated online, and threatened — and not being supported by her then-employer The New York Times while enduring it. In calling out the Times, along with other legacy media for what she says is buying into bad faith narratives, Lorenz also pointed out the exemplary conduct of The Verge in defending Sarah Jeong when she underwent similar treatment. 

Those who study online harassment and the possible moral injury consequences of it know that the biggest determinant about whether a person will have a lasting traumatic response to online harassment is how the person they first tell afterwards reacts. If there is understanding and support, the experience is less likely to have a lasting impact. So Lorenz is doing a service to future generations of journalists when she points out what she sees as inadequate support and asks for newsrooms to “better dedicate resources to it.” 

That she needs to defend herself is a statement on the current divide in media between the old guard who made their names for themselves via nepotism and/or within a less public-facing newsroom, and a new generation of reporters who’ve made their career (or “brand” lol) almost entirely online. Although countries like the UK are attempting to tackle the issue with problematic legislation that puts the onus on tech companies to combat harassment on their platforms, the problem persists. As online harassment and targeted trolling has spilled over into “real life,” media companies and governments leaving women journalists to fend for themselves in its presence is a dangerous choice. And a poor reflection on a media landscape that stands to benefit from enhanced attention, whether it be of the negative variety or not. 

[I use women because that’s the language used in most reports and it’s unclear how gender-inclusive the organizations reporting are in their use of the word but I’m going to assume that cishet women is intended in most accounts of experiences.] 

– Courtney Tenz

---

EVERYTHING ELSE

— Several journalists in the Twin Cities, MN were hit with subpoenas from the Minneapolis City Attorney related to their coverage of the protests after George Floyd’s murder. 

— The Washington Post is using a law “aimed at protecting free and open debate on public controversies” to obtain a dismissal of a discrimination lawsuit brought by one of their own writers, Felicia Sonmez, after the paper’s editors prevented her from covering stories related to sexual assault due to her own experiences of being assaulted by another reporter while working in China.

— Big Week for Big Law! A judge threw out a defamation case brought by two police officers against BuzzFeed investigative reporter Katie Baker. The judge found that the story’s intent was not to speak ill of the officers but rather to “influence systemic change in how sexual assault allegations are treated nationwide…”

— Fun answer to a fun question! Gawker reports that, per a spreadsheet available to company employees, Insider’s editor-in-chief makes $600K (as well as a $600K bonus…gasp.)

— The Klamath Falls and Herald News in Oregon is without an entire newsroom as its editor and three reporters left citing low pay as one reason for their resignations.

— Virginian-Pilot reporter Sierra Jenkins was called by her editor to cover a shooting on Saturday except, as her editor discovered, Jenkins had been tragically shot and killed in the shooting.