This is On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield. On Wednesday, Current TV journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee stepped off a plane in Burbank, California. Just days prior, they'd been prisoners in North Korea, facing 12 years of hard labor in one of the country’s infamous gulags. The details of their release are extraordinary. Apparently, the women were told they'd be freed if Bill Clinton agreed to meet with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il. They passed that message along to their families, who in turn told Current TV cofounder Al Gore, who called his former boss. The meeting was arranged, and the rest is – great TV.
[CLIPS]:
WOMAN: I can't wait to see the reunion, Bill, between Euna Lee and her little 4-year-old daughter.
DIANE SAWYER: Can we have another shot of her? Can we get the camera over there, like this?
WOMAN: Yeah, can you pan left there? Here she comes. She’s bounding up –
DIANE SAWYER: Oh!
MALE CORRESPONDENT: It’s a beautiful day here in Burbank, the white plain against the black mountains and the blue sky overhead, a beautiful welcome home for the two journalists.
FEMALE CORRESPONDENT: Well, let's watch this unfold there. We see them exiting the plane right now and there we see their family members, and we're hearing the cheers.
[CLAPPING/CHEERING]
[END CLIPS]
BOB GARFIELD: Their story has a happy ending, but for a lot of journalists who risk their lives for their reporting, that isn't the case. On the same day Ling and Lee landed in the United States, a trial began a world away in Russia, the second trial in the murder of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who devoted herself to exposing human rights abuses by the Russian Army in Chechnya. When we think of journalists in peril, many of us envision reporters like Ling and Lee, foreign correspondents in the wrong place at the wrong time. But according to investigative reporter Terry Gould, most of the time reporters who are murdered are living among their murders, and in most of the cases the perpetrators go unpunished. In his book, Marked for Death: Dying for the Story in the World’s Most Dangerous Places, Gould asks what would possess a person to put his or her life in danger to report a story. Gould profiled seven slain reporters, including Politkovskaya, in five of the most dangerous countries for journalists, Colombia, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Iraq and Russian. He conducted what he calls life investigations, interviewing journalists’ loved ones, colleagues and even the people who arranged the murders. He found that in all cases, these reporters knew they'd be killed if they pursued their investigations, but they continued anyway. As Gould explains, they shared a common psychology.
TERRY GOULD: They were all imbued with this psychology of sacrifice. We can start with the first biography I tell in the book. His name is Guillermo Bravo Vega. His mother was murdered, probably by his father, who had had her as a mistress and who took him in the house and raised him as part of the upper class Colombian society. When he was 22, 23, he was in a bar with some policemen, and he considered himself the right wing at the time, and there were some working men at a table and they got into an argument. They said to him, if you’re so brave, man, shoot me. And he picked up a gun and he shot them. He was so mortified by that event in his life that he dedicated his entire life afterwards-
BOB GARFIELD: After getting out of prison.
TERRY GOULD: Yeah, and he became a journalist, and he exposed the very system that had raised him and exposed the organized criminal elements in Colombia.
BOB GARFIELD: Guillermo not only knew he was doomed, but he actually kind of invited doom. Can you tell me the story of him leaving town and then how he behaved when he came back?
TERRY GOULD: Yes. A sicario or a hired assassin came to his house and warned him and told him to keep his doors locked and then flee town. And he told his friends, this time they'll get me. And he did flee town and he stayed away two weeks. Even though he was certain if he returned to town he'd be murdered, he came back to town. And he was working on a documentary about murdered journalists and murdered human rights workers who had been murdered by paramilitaries and the right wing. He was very much in despair towards the end of his life. He said that there was no way for him to succeed in stopping the systematic corruption in Colombia, and he knew that the story of his death would probably promote some little change, and he actually welcomed death. So he did something very unusual when he came home. Even though he should have kept his doors locked, he would leave his door open every night. And finally the murderers drove up on a motorcycle and walked through the door and killed him.
BOB GARFIELD: Now, you have described Guillermo as obsessive, and this story bespeaks some sort of combination of recklessness and resignation, but not unique to him and his story.
TERRY GOULD: I've told seven stories of seven different journalists, and I found two commonalities. The first was that they had each had a transformational event in their lives. Something had happened to them, or they had done something to others that through guilt or revelation or grief convinced them that the powerful had to be prevented from oppressing the weak at all costs. The second commonality was that they didn't arrive from somewhere else. In other words, these were not foreign correspondents coming in, staying in secure hotels. These were local journalists who went home to bungalows where all that stood between them and murder was a quarter-inch plywood door. Yet, they targeted the most malevolent forces in their countries. All these countries were run according to the principle of organized crime.
BOB GARFIELD: Another dangerous place for investigative journalism is Russia, perhaps most infamously in 2006 with the murder in her own apartment building of journalist Anna Politkovskaya. Please tell me her story.
TERRY GOULD: Anna was born to a Soviet elite family in the 1950s, and her parents were United Nations diplomats. And she became a journalist. The thing that she was concentrating on as a journalist was profiles of the elite and the artistic set within her own milieu. During the first Chechen war in 1996, she phoned a refugee center and she said that she wanted to do a story about the big-eyed Chechen children going to school. The person that ran the refugee center said to her, well, I must tell you, Anna, that they can't go to school. Come down here and see what’s going on here. Anna was a beautiful woman, almost like a model, and good clothes and good looks were very important to her. So she swishes into this refugee center, opens the door, and there lining the walls, are parents that had just lost children, children that had just lost parents, people wailing, people wounded. And she stopped up short and she said, what have I been doing with my life? And that shame that she felt for herself was compounded by the shame that she felt for the vast majority of Russians who did not care what was going on in Chechnya. And when the second Chechen war broke out, she reported on the atrocities being committed by Russian generals and their Chechen allies – rapes and murders – and named the names of the perpetrators, even as she moved amongst them in very dangerous territory.
BOB GARFIELD: This story has a tragic personal twist for you. What happened?
TERRY GOULD: I was going to use her as a source about two other Russian journalists who had given their lives for stories. I landed in Moscow on October 7th. I phoned the Committee to Protect Journalists to let them know I'd arrived and I would be speaking with Politkovskaya, and they told me, you’re too late. She was just killed today outside the elevator in her apartment house.
BOB GARFIELD: I certainly do not wish to dishonor the memories of heroes, but I have to ask you, in sort of issuing their own death sentences they obviously affected the lives of their loved ones, as well, who perhaps would have been less willing to see them die for the stories that they were working on. Does that not cross any kind of line?
TERRY GOULD: In all cases they had families. In all cases their families wanted them to stop their journalism. In all cases they looked above the heads of their own families and looked at the families of other people around them and said, these people are like my own family, and if it was done to me, I hope somebody would come forward and try and save my family.
BOB GARFIELD: Let me just ask you one last thing. The stories in your book are all about reporters taking on the continuing criminal enterprises that were their governments, you know, Mafia as state enterprises, in effect. You, in your own personal life have some experience living in that kind of culture. Can you tell me about it?
TERRY GOULD: I grew up in a lousy neighborhood in Brooklyn, and my grandfather was a member of organized crime. He was thrown off a roof when I was four years old. There was a bookie joint below our apartment house, and we would see the police come in and go out all the time. There was a bar next door where the prostitutes and the police, again, would come in and go out drunk as skunks. I got used to the idea that some people had impunity, and I also saw that where officials were allowed to break the law, ordinary people eventually joined the lawbreaking. And when you put that on a worldwide scale, eventually it gets to the point where it’s okay to murder people. When I turned to journalism and turned to organized crime, I realized that same ethic reigned in all these countries where the most journalists are being killed. They have ethics that actually have names. In Colombia it’s called regalame, give it to me for nothing. In Russia it’s called krysha. It means roof. You buy protection, influence and impunity. All these seven journalists refused to participate, and they exposed that systematic principle of organized crime, and they died in the process doing it.
BOB GARFIELD: Terry, thank you very much.
TERRY GOULD: Thank you very much for having me.
BOB GARFIELD: Terry Gould is a reporter and author of Marked for Death: Dying for the Story in the World’s Most Dangerous Places. It will be published by Counterpoint Press in September.