Situation Definition
Anticipation and silence continuously grew throughout the Bill Freeman Auditorium as one journalist stood amongst many potential journalists. Former CNN correspondent, Kimberly Dozier grabbed the audience’s attention during this year’s Foster-Foreman Conference while reading excerpts from her memoir, “Breathing the Fire: Fighting to Survive and Get Back to the Fight.” Dozier’s memoir paints a picture of an international correspondent reporting on the war in Iraq one minute and the next, waking up in a hospital after being attacked by a car bomb.
As an international reporter for more than 10 years, Dozier faced her fair share of challenges. When she stepped foot in the middle of the Iraq war, she knew she had a service to pay forward to the American public, but needed to do so in an ethical way. As she recounted the processes of reporting and producing her stories, Dozier said she needed to work around many questionable circumstances in order to avoid having a conflict of interest or bias in her work. On the other side of the ethical spectrum, Dozier touched on the fact that because journalists are surrounded by other journalists while reporting in Iraq, everyone needs to work together to fact check one another’s work and avoid fabrication.
Analysis
Dozier is someone who clearly held the ethical principle of loyalty close to her heart. She knew she was across the world relaying news back to the United States for a reason — she believed she owed that service to the public. Journalists are not trained to be in the military. They’re not wearing uniforms and they’re not prepared for whatever circumstances may arise. Therefore, they need to rely heavily on the United State soldiers in which they are traveling with.
When asked how she was able to produce some of the extremely hard-hitting news stories that she did, Dozier said she relied heavily on the soldiers who eventually she considered friends. The American troops were the ones who helped Dozier into and within the war zone. They protected her and they made sure she would make it out alive.
From the second September 11, 2001 took place, “journalistic objectivity has been a matter of frequent controversy, as the United States has waged two formal wars and is engaged by another measure in an ongoing war against terrorism.” (Aday, 2005) Dozier vividly remembered the times she would pack up her equipment and go put a story together by herself without the rest of her crew to avoid potential attacks. Yet, the American soldiers were still by her side, which is obviously necessary. In turn, Dozier could not avoid getting to know the men and women protecting her life.
There isn’t a fine line between respecting and being grateful of people who are saving your life and then shining a negative light on them in a broadcast if necessary. “Everything from whether anchors should wear patriotic lapel pins to how much a network should show civilian casualties has been at issue. Not just administration officials but journalists themselves have berated news organizations deemed not patriotic enough, with some suggesting that there is no place for detachment in wartime.” (Aday, 2005) However, Dozier questioned whether or not she missed big stories because she was too busy considering the American troops as her friends rather than avoiding bias and reporting stories on Iraqi prisoners being tortured.
The only other people spending time with Dozier while she was covering the Iraq war were soldiers, journalists, more soldiers and more journalists. Dozier said many journalists, whether working with the same network or different, would all share the same living quarters. She said there were multiple instances when journalists would bounce their ideas off of one another and ask for their feedback — other reporters are your best critiques. Dozier added that by doing this, fabrication could hopefully be avoided. After briefly mentioning Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair’s fabrications, Dozier said you cannot ever fabricate, but especially while reporting on a war that involves your own country — it’s your service to do so accurately.
A former CBS president, Frank Stanton once said, “that what the media do is to hold a mirror up to a society and try to report it as faithfully as possible.” (Kelley, 1962) This was one of Dozier’s main focal points. The rest of the population doesn’t know what a war zone looks like. They don’t know the nauseating and painful sights of the horrific battlegrounds American troops are facing. And that is where journalists such as Dozier come in to play. They work faithfully and build a trust with the American people to relay messages between the polar opposite environments.
Fabrication goes hand-in-hand with reporting the entirety of a story. Whether it is a glorified story or not, a journalist’s duty is to inform the public with every available detail. Dozier said the media “taught us to pity more than to respect the troops.” She said through the idea of only showing the stories that may draw the most attention, the media doesn’t shine a light on the people risking their lives for all American lives but instead can make the troops feel as victims.
Conclusion
Whether it’s 15 years ago or in the United States or an Iraq war zone, these ethical issues are not going away anytime soon in the journalism field. Though fabrication is most definitely not tolerated or second-guessed as much as it used to be, there will still be times in which journalists will not report the whole truth.
In terms of Kimberly Dozier, I think she was completely ethical with her work from what I was able to understand through her presentation. She was someone future journalists can look up to and see that she was a hero. Dozier went into Iraq as an international correspondent and returned as a hero. I commend her for acknowledging her potential hiccups in terms of being too close with the American troops, but at the same time I believe it’s an almost impossible task not to.
References
Aday, S., Hebert, M., & Livingston, S. (2005). Embedding the Truth A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Objectivity and Television Coverage of the Iraq War. The International Journal of Press Politics, 10, 3-12. Retrieved March 26, 2015, from http://hij.sagepub.com/content/10/1/3.short
Kelley, S. (1962). Elections and the Mass Media. Law and Contemporary Problems, 27(2), 307-326. Retrieved March 25, 2015, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1190550?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents