The creeping casualisation of war reporting

The NUJ’s Jeremy Dear called for an end to the “casualisation of war reporting” in light of the Kate Peyton case. Kate, a BBC producer, was killed in Mogadishu in 2005. The inquest into her death concluded in Ipswich Crown Court last week. The coroner, Dr Peter Dean called on managers “to recognise that staff had an overriding right to turn down dangerous jobs”, after evidence that Peyton felt pressured to take the assignment in Somalia,

Stories from war zones need to be told. But some assignments are so risky that it is not reasonable to order journalists to do them. Media managers need to change the culture so that exercising reasonable caution is never frowned upon. There will always be plenty of volunteers for dangerous jobs – there is no need to use them as tests of commitment. [said Jeremy Dear, general secretary of the National Union of Journalists] link