The young Iranian prisoner was no more than fourteen, still caked with a thick layer of dust from the battlefield. He was among thousands of old men and young boys being held in an Iraqi POW camp somewhere outside Basrah. It was September 1980, the early weeks of the Iran-Iraq War, and my CBS News crew and I had been taken to the camp by our Iraqi “minders.” A few dozen miles away, the battle for Khorramshahr raged with a level of slaughter not seen since World War One.
For weeks, we had been hearing that before they dispatched children and old men into the mine fields on massive human wave assaults, Iran’s mullah gave each of the soon-to-be martyrs a “key to paradise.” Through a translator, I asked the boy if that was true. He looked at me shyly and nodded yes. I asked if I could see it. He gave a sidelong glance at the guards, reached into the elastic waist of his POW uniform, pulled something out and held it up. The key to paradise—a thin metal disk with some Persian script. In the West, we call that a dog tag. Later, in the prison hospital, I asked a fifty-something Iranian schoolteacher whether he, too, had been told the dog tag was his key to paradise. “Yes,” he told me. Did he believe it? His face broke into a wide grin: “No, but they told me they would kill me if I didn’t go.”
Those encounters provided unrivalled insight into the mindset that was fueling the carnage that would ultimately claim more than 500,000 lives. It was also illegal. The Geneva Convention prohibits reporters from interviewing POWs. But when I aired the piece on The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, no one objected.
I thought about that story last week as I read of the uproar surrounding Egypt TV reporter Shahira Amin’s interview with Gilad Shalit, the young Israeli soldier freed by Hamas after two five years in captivity.*
The interview, held just after Shalit crossed the border into Egypt and while he was still guarded by masked Hamas gunmen, “violated all the basic ethical rules of journalism,” according to one Israeli commentator.
But how many reporters can honestly say that, given the opportunity, they would have turned down the chance to be the first to speak with Shalit? Would Israel TV have said no?
I have interviewed hostages and I have watched with professional jealousy when others beat me to it. Five years after I spoke with those poor Iranian POWs, I was horrified to learn that my ABC competitor in Beirut, Charlie Glass, beat my pants off by not only interviewing, but shooting an entire dinner with, some of the American hostages from TWA flight 847, which had been hijacked by Islamist militants. ABC broke into primetime programming with graphic banners celebrating its exclusive. Glass took some guff about not showing the Hezbollah thugs with the guns watching over the dinner, but few questioned his journalistic chops in landing the coup. Days later, when a few other hostages were trotted out in public, a scrum of reporters elbowed each other to get those microphones in place.
Basic journalist ethics can be a slippery—and contextual—thing.
When considering the ethics of the Shalit interview it might be useful to separate the ethics of doing the interview from the ethics of how the interview was conducted.
In short, consider the source. Shahira Amin is an anchor at Nile TV, the English-language service of the government-owned station that sanitized the revolution. She spent much of her career communicating the official Mubarak government line and while she resigned amid much fanfare when it was fairly clear the government would fall, she was back at work not long after.
In the Shalit interview, her questions ranged from the illogical to the ridiculous. Why didn’t he do more videos from captivity? What “lessons” did he learn? Would he campaign for the release of Palestinian prisoners? And through it all, she kept fishing for complements about Egypt’s role in the release.
The only thing slippery about this is the logical contortions you use to justify unethical behavior: “the other guy did it”, “no one cares”, “it’s a really good story”. Just come out and say what’s really on your mind: the ends can justify the means sometimes. After all the Geneva Conventions are great and all but, but its ok to violate them when it serves our purposes as journalists. What else can we expect from situational ethics like this … anything can be justified unless our ox is the one getting gored.
#1 Posted by Mike H, CJR on Thu 27 Oct 2011 at 04:02 PM
Great article! However, the writer says that the Geneva Conventions prevent reporters from interviewing POWs. Actually, it's not applicable to journalists, which may be why no one objected when he aired his report on CBS News. News outlets that are not under the control of a government are not bound by the Conventions. And that's what raises another big question about what the Egyptian reporter did here! State-owned media outlets (like Egypt TV) are arguably subject to Geneva.
#2 Posted by Josh Hogan, CJR on Thu 27 Oct 2011 at 07:34 PM
Props to CJR for stating the rather obvious point that Shahira Amin was functioning at least as much as a government functionary as a journalist. She can only hide for so long behind her posture a brave journalist who quit Nile TV during the uprising (at a time when Murbarak's downfall seemed almost certain, of course).
Had she just simply said "I'm sorry, I was wrong," there would be no controversy. One must question the sincerity of her repeated efforts to justify the unjustifiable. Her subsequent comments concerning Israel indicate perhaps the true attitude being expressed here, which was a desire to further torment Shalit.
Anyone seeing the video could see the kind of mental/physical shape/duress Shalit was in, and her rationalizations and lies are frustrating to behold. CNN should fire her. Her lack of integrity may be within the standards of conduct of Egyptian television bu not the west.
However, you ruin your piece by your "journalists in glass houses" riff at the end. Journalist attitude toward the White House et al have absolutely no bearing on the horrendous exploitation of Shalit.
#3 Posted by Alan Hess, CJR on Fri 28 Oct 2011 at 11:49 AM