Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. With the reporting from the Middle East being so complicated right now, we'd like to start today by taking you behind the scenes a little bit for how NPR reporters are kept safe in the field while still trying to be effectively reporting stories that show us both the big picture and people's individual lives.

Let me play two very short clips, then we'll talk to Caroline Drees, NPR's Senior Director for Field Safety and Security. NPR's Ari Shapiro, usually an All Things Considered host, and Leila Fadel, usually a Morning Edition host, were both deployed to the region after the October 7th attack, in addition to others who report from there anyway. Here's just a few seconds of Ari with Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie, who has been counseling survivors of the October 7th Hamas attack.

Ari Shapiro: When you as a rabbi show up and people are wounded or people have lost their families, or people have survived atrocities, what do they ask for from you?

Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie: I think the first thing they want is to be heard, to know that they're not alone in this horror, that others care and have their back. The second thing is they just want to tell their story again and again. We know that that is usually the response to trauma. Storytelling is our tool of healing.

Brian Lehrer: That was Ari Shapiro with Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie. Here's a few seconds of Leila reporting from a town in the West Bank that she will identify.

Leila Fadel: We've just arrived in Qusra, and this is an area where a few people have been killed in violence in the West Bank. As we were driving up, you can see the way this land is divided, settlements coming in, Palestinians being moved out, and Qusra is surrounded by settlements. We're here right now. We're about to meet the mayor.

Brian Lehrer: Then she interviewed the mayor. What goes into preparing for that kind of reporting in an area where, as Leila reported, people are getting killed? What goes into preparing Ari for reporting on trauma and for all the other things that journalists have to be ready for in any kind of war coverage?

The Committee to Protect Journalists reports that as of yesterday, at least 23 journalists were among an estimated 6,000 dead on both sides since the war began on October 7th, 23 journalists, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. We're very happy to have with us now Caroline Drees, the Senior Director for Field Safety and Security at NPR, based in Washington.

Previously, Caroline was Reuters managing editor for the Middle East and Africa, including during the Arab Spring. She had also been their Egypt bureau chief and helped to set up Iraq's first independent news agency. She's done lots of other things too, and speaks four languages. Caroline, I think we'll stick to English today, but thanks so much for some time this morning. Welcome to WNYC.

Caroline Drees: Thanks, Brian. Great to be here.

Brian Lehrer: Yours is a job that many listeners will never have realized exists, even if they listen to NPR every day. What does NPR's Field Safety and Security Director do?

Caroline Drees: It's my job to keep our hundreds of journalists as safe as possible while they go about their work. I do this by working extremely closely with our journalists to ensure that they've got the training, also the security gear, tools, and support before, during, and after assignments to stay safe and to stay sound.

Brian Lehrer: Let me say from the outset that we know some security measures have to be confidential, so we will respect your judgment on where those lines are during this conversation. In general, I see NPR has something called Hostile Environment Training that you're prepared to talk about. Can you give our NPR listeners a little introduction to what that is?

Caroline Drees: Absolutely. The Hostile Environments Training is one of the facets of our efforts to keep our journalists safe. It's a several-day training that we run regularly off-site to make sure that the journalists are away from their day job. We cover topics including emergency first aid, how to assess risks as you're going about your work, how to plan for security, thinking about things in advance. We teach them about situational awareness, including things like how you might appear to others.

We talk about covering protests and other large events. We discuss conflict de-escalation, how you can deal with that situation in a moment. We also talk about and teach them about subjects such as dealing with authorities, including detention and arrest. We spend a good deal of time on information security and digital hygiene, which of course, is increasingly an issue as well. Importantly, we also talk about dealing with stress and trauma and make sure that our journalists understand what resources are available to them because this is such an integral part of our work.

Brian Lehrer: On that list you just gave-- Oh, I'm sorry. Did you want to finish that? Go ahead. I'm sorry.

Caroline Drees: No worries, Brian. I was just going to say that we do update that training regularly just to make sure it stays relevant for news needs.

Brian Lehrer: One of the things you just listed was how you appear to others. What's an example of that?

Caroline Drees: I can tell you that the first time I took this training, about 30 years ago, the thing I learned, and that stays with me till today, is an image we were shown of a cameraman filming through a hotel window. From the perspective of the cameraman, he just looked like a cameraman filming out of a hotel window. Then they showed us visuals of what it looked like to people outside the hotel. If you didn't know that this was a camera person, it could have looked like he was carrying a weapon on his shoulder.

Having that awareness of what you might appear like is just important as part of your risk assessment and your understanding and to use the jargon, your situational awareness.

Brian Lehrer: For example, on preparing NPR journalists for these kinds of environments on that Leila Fadel reporting from Qusra, where, as she said, people have been getting shot in reprisal killings, a reporter doesn't drive into a place where things like that are happening like they would drive to the grocery store. What are some of the things that go into getting ready to carry out that kind of assignment?

Caroline Drees: All of our journalists would have had to complete that Hostile Environments Training, that's a given. Then we have various other protocols that we take care of before the trip even starts. Some of the things I can talk about in greater detail are that we have a security call before every trip and before daily reporting once they're in the field, in which we discuss the latest developments on the ground.

We discuss what the potential risks might be and how they can best be mitigated. We discuss what protective gear might be needed on that given assignment, what resources are available to our journalists. One thing people may not think about, but we also establish rigorous check-in schedules so I always know exactly where everyone is so that I can just check in, is everything on schedule, is everything going the way it should go, but also from my end that I can share with the teams information that I may have learned since the last time we checked in.

If anybody ever misses a check-in, this is like sending up a flare to us that we have to take action, that maybe something has gone awry. In most cases, thank God, somebody may just have run out of juice. Their cell phone may be out of juice or they're out of pocket of the network. It's a really important thing that we have to keep in mind that the journalists are out there and they require us to stay in touch with them and them with us to keep them safe.

Brian Lehrer: On protective gear, I've seen on TV news in these past two weeks plus, journalists wearing shirts or jackets that say Press in very big letters. Is that just theater for the TV audience, as far as you know, or is that an actual safety measure that news organizations take?

Caroline Drees: It is definitely not for theater, Brian. Identifying yourself visibly as press with something as obvious as a press patch is one of the tools in a journalist's security toolkit. I should emphasize that not all tools are always suitable for every situation. Together with the training that we've provided them and the guidance that I provide them every day and throughout the day, the journalists on the ground really have to assess in their given situation whether visibly identifying as a member of the press is going to enhance their safety or undermine their safety and potentially put them at risk.

Brian Lehrer: Because it could sometimes put them at risk. You're saying identifying oneself as press could increase rather than decrease the risk to them? We know we live in a world where some leaders refer to the press as the enemy of the people and mobs can get inspired by that kind of language.

Caroline Drees: I would just say in general, it's very conscious, as I was saying earlier, to know how you appear in any given situation and whether or not you decide to have a big badge on yourself that says Press or not, is one of the ways you appear in that situation and I think it's just an important thing to think about.

Brian Lehrer: Getting back to those NPR stories that we sampled from at the beginning, Ari Shapiro and Leila Fadel are both NPR news program anchors, but they are demographically different from one another. Of course, there's a whole roster of NPR journalists who are diverse in many ways, but in this case, are there specific kinds of security for Ari and for Leila that would be similar or different?

Caroline Drees: I'm really glad you asked that, Brian, because I think there might be a misconception that security is a one cookie-cutter approach or that there's a one-size-fits-all solution for security. It really isn't. When we talk about security for our individual journalists and assessing and mitigating the risk, we see it as a very complex process. In addition to factors such as the situation on the ground, we take into account things like lived experience and identity because they can have an impact on risk but also how an individual is feeling on the ground.

I speak individually with all of our journalists before they go on assignments just to make sure that we're thinking through these things together and that we're taking all the appropriate factors into account to mitigate the risks. I do my darnedest to get to know our journalists really, really well. I go to all the hostile environments training courses and I teach part of them. We spend days together and I make sure that I talk to them a lot when we're at the office because having that personal relationship helps me in that work of trying to keep them safe when they're not at the office, when they're out in the field.

Brian Lehrer: We've been talking mostly about preparedness for the journalists' physical safety. What about emotional or psychological preparedness, which you also mentioned at the beginning? The Ari Shapiro snippet, for example, was from a place where I don't think he was in physical danger, but his report with the rabbi was in the context of children who had been traumatized by the October 7th attack. That can be contagious if I can use that word, or at least very affecting. All kinds of mental health workers have to process their own feelings that their empathetic work with their clients brings up for them, and so do journalists who have to witness very difficult things. What's the prep like for that?

Caroline Drees: I'm so glad you touched on this subject because emotional wellbeing and psychological wellbeing of our journalists is so important to us, and it really is inextricably linked to working out in the field, especially in hostile or difficult environments. It's something that's really important to us at NPR. It is front and center of our preparation as well as the work we do with journalists while they're in the field and afterwards.

NPR has robust services, resources for stress and trauma support, including specialized counseling services that really know the work that we do and understand our work. They're available to our teams 24/7. We have a peer support network within NPR. Somebody might prefer speaking to another journalist as opposed to speaking to a counselor. We do include information sessions and discussions about stress and trauma during our hostile environments training.

I discuss it with reporters during the security calls I have with them before they go on assignment, and I speak to them frequently while they're out in the field particularly if I know that someone's particularly attached to a particular story or I listen to a story and I know how difficult it was. I've been through this myself as a reporter and I know how haunting reporting can be and how important that kind of care and support is.

Brian Lehrer: Can you tell us a little more about yourself and how you got into this work? Reading your bio, and you just referred to it too, it looks like you were on the direct journalism side of things with Reuters in the Middle East before going into the area of security, and now your job with NPR of Senior Director for Field Safety and Security. How'd you get interested in that?

Caroline Drees: In most of my career, I was working as you mentioned, at Reuters for 25 years primarily in places like the Middle East and Africa, but also other parts of the world where my work required a lot of security preparation and decision making, both for myself and for teams that I led later on in my career. Safety issues were a really critical part of my job for those two and a half decades. These issues included everything from the physical safety to dealing with detentions, expulsions, threats against our journalists, and then the stuff we've been talking about, the more frontline warfare situations.

In a quarter century of doing this, I covered a lot of really difficult stories both physically dangerous and emotionally challenging. I hope that that experience has given me a certain amount of street cred with our teams at NPR. The work that I've done as a journalist has taught me how incredibly important good security and wellbeing prep and planning is, and having a plan B and a plan C and a plan D. It's so much easier to divert from a plan if you have a plan than if you go in and just go, "Duh, what am I going to do next?" Having that nuance preparation, I found firsthand is extremely important.

When I joined NPR in 2019, I started focusing exclusively on the safety and security of our journalists. That includes everything from their physical security and their online security and their emotional and physical wellbeing, as we've discussed to something that surprised me that I'd be doing. I joined in November 2019 and three months later, the pandemic started. That was a whole new experience for me.

Brian Lehrer: A whole other conversation we could have had about preparedness for safety and security in the field. Caroline, I want to thank you for giving our listeners this behind-the-scenes look and how some of the reporters who are covering Israel, Gaza, we didn't even have time to get into Ukraine. Obviously, there are two major wars going on right now or we could characterize them as major or however we call them, but obviously, these two conflicts are present right now, and you prepare NPR reporters for each. I think some of our listeners are now a little bit more prepared to imagine our reporters in the field when we're hearing them just in audio. Caroline Drees, the Senior Director for Field Safety and Security at NPR. Thank you so much.

Caroline Drees: Many thanks. Good luck with your fundraising.

Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.