A difficult balance is demanded of journalists who are “embedded” with the military.
During our days in Afghanistan, we are honorary members of their club. We eat with them, travel over dangerous roads with them, and are subject to many of the same rules.
But we are not one of them. They know that, and so do we. Which creates complex dynamic.
A couple of weeks ago, two Afghan children were killed by Canadian soldiers. And the Canadian reporters here wrote about it, describing in some detail how the children died.
It is no small understatement that the incident took a huge emotional toll on those members of the military who were involved, or who knew those who were involved, or who felt some responsibility, even tangentially, because they are part of the same army.
Canadians do not kill kids – not knowingly.
There was deep hurt that the reporters who are so friendly most of the time could have turned on their military friends and written stories that drove the knife just that much deeper.
I was not here in Afghanistan when the children were killed so I was not one of those whose byline appeared on those reports. But I have had to explain, on a couple of different occasions, that, had I been embedded at the time, I would likely have written about what transpired in exactly the same way.
Journalists live for details. They are our stock in trade. And, as long as we know them to be fact, we throw them into our work without giving a lot of thought about who might be reading on the other end – at least we try to. Sometimes we agonize about what the fallout will be. But we do our best to get over it.
The people who read our work deserve as fully formed a picture as our words can paint.
Which does, as on this occasion, cause pain to some of the people we write about.
The defence I have offered, and I am not sure that it has been entirely accepted, is that we report in this way because theses stories are news.
We write about them because they do not happen every day. We write about them because we are embedded in an army that does not kill children, not on purpose anyway, and because there was just as much shock within military ranks at this horrible miscue as there was among folks back home.
And we write about them because they would not be news we if we were embedded with soldiers whose guts no longer churned at the thought of kids dying.
