A seminar for editors sponsored by The Crimes of War Project and The Freedom Forum

Day Two, Closing Remarks: Roy Gutman

ROY GUTMAN: We're not going to do a formal wrap-up today. Gene Roberts has taken ill this afternoon. He had a number of things to say, though, and he asked me to pass on two thoughts to you. And I want to do those. First of all, one observation of his, which I think might have been the observation of a number of us, was that a fascination during our panel this morning with the American military and the DOD talking about the extent to which they now use the laws of war in their targeting exercises. That the number of people they're devoting to it, it's something that really is news. I sort of suspected it. In our book we've hinted at it in a number of places. But we simply didn't know just the quantity of effort that goes into that was one of Gene's observations.

A second observation he made was that -- and this really comes from our photographer friends to some extent -- that access for journalists covering conflict is really a problem. It is a growing problem and it's not clear what we can do about it. But Gene wanted to say that we as reporters and you as editors should think about this a bit. We should get to our governments, the Western governments in particular. I hope we're past the Vietnam syndrome in the United States, but I'm not sure if we're entirely past it. But we ought to somehow start thinking again about access to conflict zones. Especially to the extent things are ever affected by Western governments, to the extent Western governments are involved in conflicts. It seems to me a very useful and constructive idea which we can also bring up to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

His third observation, which I think I would totally share by the way we set this whole seminar up, is the need for more training. And Gene feels, and I think, I hope everybody endorses this, that preparation, training, and I think, frankly, a section on PTSD is going to be one of them, really is essential. It will give us as reporters more confidence and should give our editors more confidence. The question is just how do we do it? How is it possible that the United States, which is so advanced on so many issues, so many areas, doesn't seem to have among our superb media -- and I think, obviously, CNN is a big exception and some of the networks, I think the New York Times to a slight extent -- in general, though, we have not had training courses for reporters covering conflict. That's been the exception rather than the rule. He is of the view that we can do it. And he will help make it happen. He thinks the idea is to go to a foundation basically and just find the money to do it the first time and see if we can get this off the ground. He asked me to ask the editors who are here or representatives of the media, if they are willing to send a person for a three-day course or a four-day course. In other words, to actually take this course so that we could make it widely enough spread so that at least -- and the idea would be to have the reporter who you think you would next assign to a conflict or to a conflict zone, the kind of person you might want to send. So if you could give me your views on that afterwards, I think Gene Roberts will make this happen. He's made a lot of other things happen in journalism in this country and so I would not doubt that this one won't too.