Bearing Witness: War Correspondent Janine di Giovanni On Reporting From the Battleground

With an increasing number of controversies swirling around journalists" coverage of war and occupation, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ominously warned that "People need to be very careful about what they say, just as people need to be careful about what they do."

Today we take a look at the dangers the media faces both at home and abroad. Later in the program we will hear an address by hip historian and journalist Davey D about the Clear Channeling of America and the hip hop generation. But first, we go to an interview with Janine Giovanni -- one of the most experienced war correspondents in the world. She has worked for scores of newspapers, TV stations and magazines. She is a Senior Foreign correspondent for The Times of London. She also reports for the BBC and Vanity Fair. She has written a number of books about her experiences in war zones. She is featured in a new film by Barbara Kopple called "Bearing Witness," which follows five female war correspondents. Her latest book is called Madness Visible : A Memoir of War.

I'm going to begin by reading her words.

"In the 1990s, a series of violent wars kept coming, like wave after brutal wave. I was part of an elite, tight band of international reporters – a tribe, really – who roamed the earth, working from front lines or cities under siege. In those days, we rarely wore flak jackets.

"But we believed in the stories we were reporting, in the importance of bearing witnesses to evil regimes, to ethnic cleansing, to genocide and systematic rape. After Israel came Bosnia. After Bosnia, Rwanda. Liberia. Congo. Chechnya. Sierra Leone. East Timor. Ivory Coast. Zimbabwe. Somalia. Afghanistan. Iraq. I know I've mercifully forgotten some.

"I had a major epiphany in Conackry, Guinea in May, 2000. I had been robbed the night before but I was still trying to bribe my way onto the last flight to Freetown. The rebel RUF were closing in on the capitol, and any one who could was scrambling for the last flights out.

And I was trying to throw myself onto one of the empty helicopters flying in to Freetown to evacuate people. What kind of person was I, running into the fire when everyone else was diving for cover?"

I began by asking Janine to talk about what she wrote.

* Janine di Giovanni, war correspondent and author of "Madness Visible: A Memoir of War"

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