TRUE GRIT
One of the great ironies of the Information Age has been a deluge of what can hardly be termed ‘information’ with a straight face, and a paucity of true, insightful, powerful journalism.
These last months, that trend was accelerated by the tragic deaths of several throwbacks to an old guard of journalism where reporters were actually willing to put their life on the line to report the gritty stories that today garner a fraction of our attention, now captivated by a tsunami of social media inanity.
Tim Hetherington, Anthony Shadid, and Marie Colvin were three giants in journalism. It’s hard to imagine anyone stepping up to replace them, especially in an age where information delivery systems (websites, apps, social media) are now often mistaken for information itself.
No matter how sophisticated we become technologically, it’s hard to see a change in the process of the timeless work that these three generated. They ducked barbed wire fences, clandestinely making their way to the heart of unsettlingly brutal and historic stories, and penned the pieces of journalism that became the first drafts of history.
Dodging mortars, trudging all night through combat zones, and witnessing the most depraved acts that humanity can muster, they were the witnesses of a monumental convulsion in Middle East history that continues today.
Hetherington, who died in Libya during the uprising last year, was known for shooting much of ‘Restrepo,’ a documentary film that was the visual counterpart to Sebastian Junger’s book ‘War,’ and told the story of the extremes a Marine unit in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley endured on the front lines of a very strange war. Hetherington had quietly traveled to conflict after conflict with camera in hand before heading to Libya, where he was killed by a mortar shell.
Shadid was a legend in the shrinking world of foreign correspondence. Fluent in Arabic and with a deep knowledge of the sweep of history across the Middle East, he became known as one of the most eloquent and tenacious foreign correspondents in a generation. While other journalists were chasing the military units crisscrossing Iraq and Afghanistan, reporting on military tactics and strategy, Shadid collected the details of everyday life for individual Iraqis swept up in the explosions, gunfire, and devastation.
He paid a price for that tenacity. In Israel’s West Bank he was shot in the shoulder by a sniper, and in Libya he and three colleagues were held hostage and brutally beaten by Al-Ghaddafi’s forces.
Shadid died while fleeing Syria on horseback in mid-February. It has been widely reported that he succumbed to an asthma attack, when his lungs had an allergic reaction to the horses he relied on to take him out of the war-torn country.
Marie Colvin’s death, also in February, was perhaps the most heartbreaking. The New York–born Sunday Times reporter was the veteran of more than a dozen brutal conflicts across the globe. Her eye patch concealed a wound she sustained when shrapnel from a grenade flew into her face during her reporting in Sri Lanka in 2001. Holed up in a Syrian suburb of Baba Amr during the last day of her life, Colvin wrote of a Syrian army ‘simply shelling a city of cold, starving civilians’ and of a scene where ‘all there is to see are shredded clothes, broken pots, and the shattered furniture of families destroyed.’ Shortly after writing those words, a Syrian military shell crashed into the building she was in and killed her.
These days there are fewer Hetheringtons, Shadids, and Colvins informing us. News outlets dedicate massive resources to discovering the next gadget on the upcoming iteration of the iPhone, even as the field of foreign correspondents thins and thins and thins.
Fewer publications can foot the bill for expensive foreign bureaus, and fewer J-school grads have any appetite for putting their life at risk to write anything truthful about the next far-flung conflict.
The honesty of the reporting of the Shadids and Colvins, where war was not about strategy or winning and losing but about something much more complex and devastating, is withering away in our brave new Information Age.
Our digital world is increasing efficiencies, developing social media networks, and changing the way information is delivered. The Syrian opposition even used YouTube to valiantly report the atrocities from their shelled homes. But there is something unique about the now-scarce journalist who reports not as part of the conflict, but as a keen observer aware of a blend of history and human nature intimately enough to contextualize a conflict. There are no shortcuts to the information produced by Tim Hetherington, Anthony Shadid, and Marie Colvin. No app can stand in for a decade of being shot at and mortared across the globe.
As Mort Rosenblum said in the New York Times, ‘No one added more substance to that devalued label, journalist, than Anthony Shadid … He knew the only way to get a story straight was to be close enough to look it in the eye.’
And in a powerful remembrance of Marie Colvin in The Guardian, Deborah Orr said, ‘Britain’s own politicians are fond of saying that while intervention is not always possible, it is right for other countries to intervene ‘when they can.’ Journalists have no such fine distinctions. It is always right to bear witness. It is always right to inform. Colvin always did what was right. And that is a very rare epitaph.’
If we want a true Information Age, we must have more Shadids, Colvins, and Hetheringtons — reporters who not only have the bravery to pursue these stories, but also the skill and grit to tell the tales as they need to be told. The most important information in today’s world does not come from computer code, social networks, or mobile devices. It still comes from an endangered breed of journalist — threatened by shrinking news budgets and the attention deficit disorder of our addiction to instantaneous information — who are still willing to do the hard, dangerous work that we all should pay more attention to.
Despite living in a small town and often reporting on things like aquatic weeds and poorly behaved bears, these last weeks have brought deep pride and profound sadness to be counted as a distant occupational cousin of Shadid, Hetherington, and Colvin.
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