Gutsy journalists take advantage of a free press
by Steve Weinberg Posted Tue, Jan 1 2002
If the magazine you are reading right now ever became a book, it would probably read much like Words of Fire by Anthony Collings. His book does in hundreds of pages what Global Journalist magazine does in dozens of pages four times a year: It chronicles the courage of reporters and editors around the world who try to tell the truth despite dangers to their careers and sometimes to their very existence.
Collings is an academic now, a communications professor at the University of Michigan. Previously, though, he saw international journalists up close, working for CNN, Newsweek, the Associated Press and The Wall Street Journal in Lebanon, London, the Soviet Union and Bonn, among other countries. The book, though relatively brief, attempts to explain the dangers of international journalism across the globe using an imaginative, four-part structure. In the first part, Collings proceeds country by country, with an emphasis on the dangers to journalists in Mexico, Russia, Taiwan and Nigeria. In part two, he examines particular types of stories that lose the wrath of those who have been exposed, stories about high-level government or military corruption, about separatist movements, about civil wars, about rioting, about economic secrecy. In the third part, Collings chronicles the ways in which journalists are attacked, focusing on imprisonment, physical violence, litigation and economic pressures. In part four, he looks at the ways in which beleaguered journalists respond to the dangers, including their use of the Internet to bypass the censors and their reliance on advocacy groups such as the Committee to Protect Journalists.
At the beginning of the book is a map of the world, in which Collings designates the media on each continent as “free,” “partly free,” or “not free.” He explains that his book will concentrate on journalists “in the countries that lie somewhere between the extremes of repression and freedom. ...They are the battleground countries, where it is still an open question whether independent journalists will prevail.” Collings says that 39 percent of the world’s population lives in those countries, the most populous of which are Indonesia, Brazil, Russia, Pakistan, Nigeria and Mexico.
The case studies are mostly in the heroic mold —courageous journalists who ignore danger to themselves and their loved ones as they struggle against the mighty. As a result, many of the journalists chronicled in the book, just like many of the journalists chronicled in the magazine, come across as something less than flesh and blood. Readers never come close to understanding the genetic and environmental forces that led the journalists to take such risks. It is a shame that Collings failed to take advantage of the book format by delving much deeper than he did into what motivates the journalists he names. Still, the case studies, despite their superficiality, have much to teach. Some of the journalists Collings names were previously unknown to me —I had not read about them in this magazine, in Committee to Protect Journalists publications or elsewhere.
I hope Collings’ reporting is more careful in the remainder of the book than it is in the two pages about which I am directly familiar. He mentions the organization I used to direct day to day, but he calls it Independent Reporters and Editors (IRE) rather than its correct name, Investigative Reporters and Editors. Furthermore, Collings says IRE began after the 1976 murder of Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles. In fact, IRE began the year before Bolles’ murder. Finally, he summarizes the investigation of the murder misleadingly and includes brief source notes for each chapter. Those source notes are silent about the section on IRE, so I am unsure about how his errors came to be. The notes for other portions of the book give me some confidence that Collings is usually an informed reporter.
Journalists who read the book might learn little that is new, or might learn a lot, depending on how fully they traditionally follow world threats to media around the world. It would be wonderful if this book, meant to be accessible, reaches lots of non-journalists. Almost surely, any non-journalists studying Collings’ words would end up with a better understanding of how their lives could be improved by media as untrammeled as possible.
Steve Weinberg
Steve Weinberg reviews books regularly for Global Journalist, concentrating on journalistic technique rather than summaries of content.