Iraq is too dangerous for journalists to do proper work there, say former BBC journalists Rageh Omaar and Martin Bell. No it isn't, counters their one-time colleague John Simpson. So who's right? asks David Fickling.
Certainly Iraq is turning into a graveyard for journalists. War correspondents were once thought to have charmed lives, filing their reports unscathed while death and destruction rumbled around them. But in Iraq, the death toll of 127 journalists following the killings of two British CBS journalists yesterday compares grimly to the tally of 113 British soldiers killed.
Seasoned correspondents routinely lament that Iraq is no fun anyway, and the Guardian withdrew its own permanent Baghdad posting after correspondent Rory Carroll was kidnapped last year. Three years of Iraq have claimed more journalistic lives than 20 years of war in Vietnam, according to Reporters Sans Frontieres. What reporting could be worth such a grisly price?
Much of the debate on this issue will be baffling to the public, because journalists tend to cloak their working methods in a veil of secrecy. The truth is that a lot of a reporter's work is done sat at desks, not on the streets. She or he will leave the office to meet a contact in person, or to attend an event, or to gather local colour. But those are the exceptions, not the rule.
This should give some context to the competing claims about Baghdad. Rageh tells us that western reporters do all their work from the comfort of heavily-guarded hotels, but Simpson demurs. He admits that the BBC would be lost without the spools of footage pouring in from locally-recruited Reuters and Associated Press crews, but says the bulk of the remaining research is done "the old-fashioned way - by ringing people up and asking them".
Getting outside the BBC's compound "can be tricky", he says, and "needs careful planning" with Auntie's team of SAS- and Marines-trained security guards.
It's a defence that raises as many questions as it asks. A bureau in London would be capable of collating agency footage just as well as their counterparts in Baghdad.
As for reporting the "old-fashioned way", journalists can make calls from London just as well as from Baghdad. War News Radio, an internet radio programme that has attracted mainstream attention for the quality of its reporting on Iraq, is put together by untrained university students over the phone from Philadelphia.
A local bureau really comes into its own only when there are big, dramatic emergencies that demand local colour, but in Iraq such incidents are usually too dangerous to risk a world affairs editor on.
These days when we see the likes of John Simpson in front of the camera in Iraq, he will likely be top-and-tailing a report that's already been assembled, perhaps vox-popping a local for their opinions of the situation.
This can sometimes make for compelling reporting, such as in Simpson's own much-ridiculed but enthralling "liberation" of Kabul.
But it would be dishonest to suggest that such details were anything more than icing on the news cake. With a handful of laudable exceptions, the value that western journalists add to their Iraq stories is closer to entertainment than it is to pure honest reporting. The journalism that really matters - the journalism worth risking your life for - is about facts, not images, however powerful or emotive those images may be.
