WAR IN GEORGIA: HOW THE UK MEDIA TOLD THE STORY
By Rachael Gallagher, Patrick Smith, Meabh Ritchie
Press Gazette
14 August 2008
UK
The week-old conflict between Russia and Georgia over South Ossetia
has already claimed its first journalist fatality after Dutch
cameraman Stan Storimans, working for RTL News, was killed in a
Russian bombardment of the city of Gori on Tuesday.
According to the International News Safety Insititute some five
journalists and media workers have been killed covering the troubled
region.
Jon Williams, world news editor for BBC News, said the safety situation
during the conflict was "catastrophic".
He added: "Journalists aren’t being targeted, but if you’re flying
a plane it’s difficult to distinguish whether somebody is a fighter
or a journalist."
Covering the conflict placed huge challenges on news organisations
after it broke out at the same time as the Beijing Olympics opening
ceremony on Friday.
The Independent claimed to have the first two newspaper correspondents
in the worst-hit area of Tskhinvali in South Ossetia, Kim Sengupta
and Sean Walker.
The Guardian’s Moscow-based correspondent Luke Harding cut short
a holiday to jet into Georgia and has been reporting from Gori and
Tbilisi. Stringer Tom Parfitt reported from North Ossetia on Monday
and Helen Womack reported from Moscow.
The Times has reporter Tom Halpin in Gori, Georgia.
Telegraph Moscow correspondent Adrian Bloomfield travelled to Georgia
in time to file copy from the front line for Saturday’s paper.
Reuters carried extensive coverage from the conflict, helped by its
Georgian and Russian-based staff.
On Tuesday this week, just before the Russian suspension of
hostilities, a Reuters reporter’s vehicle narrowly escaped several
bomb blasts near Gori while the agency’s journalists reported seeing
piles of dead bodies in the streets.
The agency already had two text reporters and a photographer in Tbilisi
and claims to have been first in recognising that the clashes in
South Ossetia were more serious than the frequent skirmishes between
pro-Russian separatists and Georgian troops.
Correspondent Margarita Antidze sent reports with a South Ossetian
dateline on Saturday. Tbilisi happens to be home to one of Reuters’
most experienced war cameramen, David Chkhikvishvili.
Known as "Big Dato" to his colleagues, he has been based in Georgia
since 1993 and has reported from Chechnya, Nagorno Karabakh, Macedonia,
Afghanistan and Kosovo.
It was his spectacular video images of Georgian rockets being launched
into the sky towards South Ossetia that made most TV bulletins on
Friday morning.
Reuters then added an extra text reporter and a TV crew from Moscow
and, once fighting broke out, brought in staff from London and Istanbul
as well as a satellite uplink to transmit live video.
The Reuters World Desk in London, depleted by staff holidays and at
the same time working on the Olympics, worked through the night on
economic and security analysis pieces on the Friday.
The BBC World Service was already covering the build-up to the conflict
at midnight last Thursday, ahead of most other news organisations
who were focusing on the build-up to the Olympics. The BBC was lucky
to have a permanent BBC correspondent based in Tbilisi – Matthew
Colin. He was joined by the BBC’s Moscow correspondent Richard Galpin
on the Friday, and by 6pm BBC News was broadcasting live from Tbilisi.
Saleem Patka, editor of BBC Worldwide’s main news programme World
Briefing, said: "The World Service was across the story much sooner
than most other outlets, we’d been covering the build-up when it
all blew up. Nobody was talking about it, but we were because it is
one of the areas we keep an eye on, when it all kicked off we were
the place people could turn to for expertise. We’ve got specialist
experience because we have a regional specialist Steven Eke who can
give background at the drop of a hat."
Sky News has bureaux in China and Moscow, and the Moscow office had
been tracking the developments in South Ossetia for some time. "We
were ready and had the necessary accreditation to go south," said
head of foreign affairs Adrian Wells. "As soon as it became clear
that a conflict had broken out into gunfire, our team of three at
the Moscow office headed down."
A team of four were sent from London, including chief correspondent
Stuart Ramsay, senior foreign news editor, a cameraman and a freelance
satellite engineer.