Abstract
The role of the Western war reporter has come under scholarly and public debate amidst significant shifts in the profession. The view that war reporting is done by rugged, predominantly male individuals has mostly fallen by the wayside, leading to a more nuanced understanding of the complexities of labor shared between local and foreign reporters, local producers, and even sources. The debate may even lead some to question: whither the Western war reporter?
In her memoir, No Ordinary Assignment, journalist Jane Ferguson offers a deeper perspective on who war reporters are and why they choose their line of work. In her words, war reporters are “complex, curious creatures with wandering souls” who are “shaped and driven as humans and professionals beyond our grand ideals and neat, noble phrases.” A crucial aspect of Ferguson’s book is the blending of professional reflections with personal ones, an approach that is well suited to the conventions of the memoir genre. As a result, readers gain a more vulnerable and personal look into the often-sensationalized aspects of war reporting practices. The book is structured across four parts that serve a dual purpose: first, they recount the trajectory of Ferguson’s career and, second, they develop the progression of how her understanding of war correspondence has been shaped and re-shaped by her experiences in the field.
Part 1 recounts Ferguson’s childhood and education. Growing up in Northern Ireland during The Troubles, she describes a stifled and anxious childhood and recalls escaping her suppressed environment through the reports of journalists like Martha Gellhorn and Kate Adie, women who reported lucidly about war and conflict. Ferguson’s initial understanding of war reporting is understandably romanticized; the courage of these women reporters is a testament to the nobility of the profession but also an inspiration for her to seek opportunities beyond the confines of her upbringing.
Ferguson begins her career as a reporter for Gulf News in Dubai, but quickly decides that covering soft news is not the kind of journalism she wants to do. This leads to a leap of faith when she flies to Kabul as a freelancer to report on the turbulent 2009 presidential election. It is here that Ferguson encounters British war photographer Tim Page, who is the first person to tell her that the purpose of war reporting is to cover people, not war. The conversation offers a valuable perspective, given that Page is not only highly experienced, but also representative of an era of journalists who entered the profession with few barriers and gained unprecedented access to the frontlines of war (he describes, for example, “thumbing choppers” in Vietnam). In many ways, Page fits the age-old archetype of a grisly lone war reporter, but his scathing critique on war reporting as an obsession with “bang bang” stories at best and a vanity project for individual war reporters at worst is contradictory to what Ferguson, and perhaps even the reader, expects to hear. She describes a pang of embarrassment at how much she had obsessed over proving her worth to other reporters, rather than truly understanding that the stories she reported on belonged to the people who lived them, not to her. The reflection opens up a tension that extends beyond her memoir and addresses the ethos of the profession as a whole, which she returns to at various intervals throughout the remainder of the book.
Parts 2 and 3 encompass the myriad assignments of Ferguson’s years as a fully-fledged journalist in the Middle East, where she continues to establish herself in the war and conflict beat. These chapters reveal structural precarity within the profession – despite selling many of her reports to CNN, she is never offered a full-time contract due to a blatant reluctance from news networks to assume responsibility in sending reporters to cover regions that are simultaneously high risk and low priority from a news value perspective. When Al Jazeera enlists her to be smuggled into Homs, Syria, by rebels taking a stand against the Assad regime, Ferguson recounts plainly that sending a freelancer was a “smart move” for the network, who could rely on plausible deniability were anything to happen to her on assignment. These insights are rather damning in revealing the callousness of news networks; they also demonstrate how war reporting can, actually, be a lone endeavor when journalists are forced to pursue stories in certain regions at their own risk.
Part 4 brings the culmination of Ferguson’s assignments to the fall of Kabul. By this point, she has won awards for her reporting and has finally begun to feel that she has proven her worth to the profession and to herself. Yet, as her success is solidifying, the situation in Afghanistan is deteriorating. It is the final chapter, aptly titled “The Fall,” that offers readers the most novel and troubling insight into the backend of news production during the collapse of a state and the breakdown of social order. Ferguson describes how arbitrary systems to evacuate Afghans with visas and dual passports are set up and then immediately abandoned as the imminence of Taliban takeover cements in the city. It is in these moments of chaos and desperation that Ferguson decides to act beyond her charge as a journalist; when she is not reporting, she works to help as many people as she can to secure passages on flights out of the country.
The decision is a direct answer to a recurring question that Ferguson grapples with–the question of whether she is doing enough, and whether reporting on conflict has anything to offer people who are suffering and in need of much more acute assistance than the delayed awareness that an international news report can provide. The question is never neatly answered–and includes forces beyond her control–but she maintains her belief in the power of storytelling, especially when reporters are empathetic about their subjects. This alone will not solve the paradoxes of the profession, but it at least offers a candid reflection of its potential when wielded responsibly.
Ferguson’s memoir provides her with the space to explain how her life experiences shaped her career as a war reporter. She also uses the book to put forward a certain approach to war reporting, one that follows the sentiments of Tim Page by focusing “on our subjects, instead of on who is narrating them.” While this statement is addressed to fellow journalists, it leads to relevant questions for journalism scholars. What insight would be gained if the lens of analysis was expanded beyond war reporters, to include subjects of war reporting? Does Ferguson’s approach to war reporting reflect a consensus, or a division among practitioners? No Ordinary Assignment might not provide the answers to these questions, but it offers journalism scholars an alternative to in-depth interviews in examining how lived experience and institutional structures simultaneously shape the work of war reporters and their understanding of the profession (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2018).
