By Anna Therese Day
In February 2016, three colleagues and I were arrested, interrogated, and imprisoned while reporting on the five-year-anniversary of Bahrain’s popular uprising.
We were initially apprehended with Mazen Mahdi, a Bahraini photographer who faces ongoing threats, surveillance, and interrogation for continuing his work. In 2014, he survived abuse at the hands of Bahraini authorities who arrested him for covering local demonstrations.
We were detained by the same police who arrested my colleague Nazeeha Saeed, a television reporter who, like me, cut her journalistic teeth reporting the larger-than-life stories of the Arab Spring. During her detention, she was blindfolded, beaten with a hose-pipe, punched, kicked, and subjected to electric shocks. One police officer shoved her head in a toilet; another poured urine on her face. To this day, her torturers walk free.
We were held in the same facilities where our colleagues, Abdulkarim al-Fakhrawi and Zakariya Rashid Hassan al-Ashiri, died of “kidney failure” and “sickle-cell anemia” respectively, according to Bahraini authorities. Their bodies were released from police custody with damning indications of torture.
These crimes against journalists show just how much is at stake for our colleagues who work under repressive regimes – threats at a scale of which our team likely never faced in Bahrain as U.S. passport-holders. These stories illustrate precisely why our team was reporting on the Bahraini uprising and how much worse the situation could have become for our sources had safety precautions not been taken from the onset. In this article, I’d like to focus on how professional development opportunities, provided through the Global Safety Principles & Practices prevented a far worse outcome for me, my colleagues, and, most importantly, our sensitive Bahraini sources. More succinctly, I’d like to explain why A Culture of Safety (ACOS) Alliance, the new industry-wide movement to provide freelance reporters with professional support, is so important for a freelance journalist like me.
As the Arab Spring erupted, so did the wave of young freelance journalists. We accepted, if not gleefully embraced, the “opportunities” presented by mainstream news outlets who offered “digital” rates in place of previous print or broadcast standards. In retrospect, we were often the scabs that allowed these organizations to survive the record layoffs of our veteran colleagues. Yet many of those same veteran reporters, newly freelance, were the very journalists who used their expensed hotel rooms to house young freelancers in Libya. In Syria, it was Toby Muse, formerly of the AP, who helped me write my first accepted print pitch; photographer Carlos Palma who calmed me by explaining how adrenaline affects your peripheral vision and can lead to chilling flashbacks; photographer Andrew Stanbridge who shared Cipro to relieve a debilitating stomach bug while bombs dropped on us in Aleppo province; and a hotel lobby full of veteran journalists who not only assured me that I was right to burn a bridge with a news outlet to protect a source, but also offered up their Rolodexes to find a new publisher.
In moments of despair, it was Roy Gutman, formerly of McClatchy, who not only tirelessly mentored young journalists in the craft of print reporting, but also provided us with the perspective to understand that, even if our work wasn’t ending an unthinkable war, a single story that honors one family’s pain is always worth it.
In a different vein, but an issue that must be noted: as a young woman, it was the countless number of veteran women journalists, as well as the International Women’s Media Foundation, who extended outrage, services, and solidarity in cases of sexual harassment, which has left too many of my colleagues feeling violated.
By 2012, after the tragic deaths of Marie Colvin, Anthony Shadid, and other industry heroes, most news organizations pulled their staffers from Syria. The responsibility shifted to freelancers – 80 percent of the coverage of the Syrian war came from us. By the end of that year, after many of our freelance colleagues had been killed or abducted, the award-winning photographer Ayman Oghanna bravely posted what would become a manifesto for our organization. His Facebook post railed against outlets asking freelancers to work on spec in Syria, “because members of my journalism tribe have been killed there. Other members are missing there, yet to be found… That is a precedent that should never have been set. It actively encourages freelancers to take risks and die alone without any support.”
In early 2013, Aris Roussinos (now of VICE News) responded to the chorus of victim-blaming directed at young freelance journalists who had been swept up by the risks of this job. “The pressure comes from the industry,” he argued. “On the one hand, [they’re] saying ‘inexperienced freelancers are taking reckless risks, what are these wild crazy kids up to these days?’ and then you’ve got other people, perhaps at the same organization, saying ‘there’s not enough bang-bang, go back and get some more fighting.”
Much has changed since these statements were made. Later in 2013, with the support of the London-based Frontline Club and the White Paper on Freelance Journalism Safety that it commissioned, our colleagues were able to formalize all the peer-to-peer efforts of freelance journalists by establishing the Frontline Freelance Register (FFR), the only representative body organized by conflict reporters for conflict reporters. FFR works to address the immediate needs of our members, while also negotiating with the industry and self-policing our community. By 2014, after the sickening broadcast of the murder of our colleagues, allies within the industry – including the OPC – helped FFR and other journalist safety groups create better industry standards for freelance journalists. By early 2015, the Global Safety Principles and Practices, were adopted and signed by industry leaders, journalist safety groups, freelancers, and others – a movement now known as A Culture of Safety (ACOS) Alliance.
As a result of this process, I completed my first hostile environment training (HEFAT) with Global Journalist Security, a DC-based hostile environment training-provider, in the summer of 2015. I’d been reporting from Syria, Gaza, Egypt, and Libya for years at this point with only the mentorship of veteran colleagues, Rory Peck Trust’s Risk Assessment & Communications Plans (a free online guide for preparation and emergency planning), and a free first aid training, provided by the tireless efforts of Reporters Instructed in Saving Colleagues (RISC)). I had previously asked two different long-term clients to support my HEFAT (given that the current costs of these trainings are prohibitively expensive for freelancers due to the industry’s unprofessional rates). Each gave reasons as to why they could not absorb the HEFAT expense at that time. In the spring of 2015, one of those clients signed the Global Safety Principles & Practices, and, by pointing our producer to that agreement, my team and I were able to negotiate our first HEFAT before an upcoming shoot.
It was this HEFAT that honed our skills in digital security – a skill that turned out to be the single most important aspect of our preparation for the Bahrain shoot. This training allowed us to communicate securely with contacts, to securely upload our footage while reporting, and to remotely wipe all of our devices when we were arrested. Had these measures not been taken to the most stringent level of application, our sources could have been jeopardized as we flew out on our US Embassy-facilitated deportation.
In terms of our emergency plan, it again was Rory Peck Trust’s Risk Assessment and Communication Plans that served as the roadmap that provided our colleagues and families with a detailed outline on activating our emergency plan, dealing with government and NGO allies, coordinating with my colleagues at FFR, and mobilizing a media strategy – all of which no doubt contributed to our quick release.
Like Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times, Ben Anderson of VICE, Jonathan Miller of Channel 4 News, and most international news outlets covering Bahrain, we made the decision, based on our team’s unique risk profile and the facts on the ground, to enter Bahrain without official Bahraini press credentials. Like our colleagues, we were meeting with sources that risk arrest, torture, or worse for speaking out about government oppression or meeting with journalists who may or may not be monitored by the regime. We consulted with the Committee to Protect Journalists’ best practices on press credentials, ensuring that we were traveling with international press cards and evidence of our status as journalists. These press cards helped the Embassy lobby against our charges – charges that were initially related to “entry on a tourist visa vs. media visa” (for which the penalty is a fine and deportation) but later escalated to “participation in unlawful protest,” “rioting,” and “terrorism” after we refused to cooperate with authorities when asked for our sources.
Our team was ultimately released within 72 hours of our arrest, deported to Dubai, and endured limited abuse in detention. To this day, we stand by our difficult but calculated decision to report without press credentials in this specific context. Given the state of press freedom around the world, we will likely find ourselves in a situation where we take that same calculated risk, a risk that journalists, freelance or staff, have taken for generations.
While we would hope that, as a community, all of these security measures would be common practice, many outlets still do not require or encourage this kind of preparation on freelance assignments. Many organizations do not have the institutional memory, capacity, or expertise to support us when we undertake these security measures ourselves. Too often have I and my FFR colleagues found ourselves training the very editors and producers that commission us.
This is why ACOS is so important for us freelancers, why we are immensely grateful for industry participation, but why we also need even more urgency from our industry partners in terms of implementation.
Through generous donations from Rory Peck Trust, the International Women’s Media Foundation, and Reuters, many more of us were able to obtain our hostile environment training last year. These HEFATs are invaluable for us; in the case of our arrest in Bahrain, the training may have saved lives.
Yet an equally, if not more valuable contribution from our industry partners, is cultivating an internal urgency on the elements of ACOS that include structural reform, particularly on pay and contracts.
To put it bluntly, we need our industry allies to demand that invoices are processed on time and that expenses are transferred in advance. These payment issues are not only unprofessional and unethical, but they are also illegal in other industries and extremely dangerous in ours. And we need our industry partners to ask for what ACOS, FFR, and our individuals members can’t negotiate with companies, but what Sebastian Junger, perhaps our most loyal and indefatigable ally, has: professional pay. Sebastian Junger and RISC Training issued a statement last year about training and pay in which rates and standards are outlined. We need our allies within the industry to stand by us in this uphill battle for fair, professional rates. Fair pay is directly and inextricably linked to safety in the field: it affects the decisions we make on the ground, and when companies cut corners on pay, it forces our colleagues to cut corners on our safety.
The stakes have never been higher for freelance journalists around the world. As FFR co-founder Emma Beals recently put it, we can and must eliminate the threat from within. ACOS has the potential to mend the rifts between news organizations and freelancers and to change the industry’s safety standards as a whole. For freelance journalists, the failure to seize this moment is not just a missed opportunity; we’ve seen firsthand that it could be the difference between life and death.
Anna Therese Day is an award-winning independent journalist. Her work has appeared on CNN, Al Jazeera, VICE, and in The New York Times. She is a founder of Frontline Freelance Register (FFR).