Kevin Dawes in Libya
Now, here’s someone who really deserves more traffic. Kevin Dawes, a “freelance battlefield journalist” from San Diego, reports from the middle of an artillery barrage east of Misrata, Libya, via his YouTube channel. Some of Dawes’s videos were uploaded as recently as two hours ago, but this was taken the day before yesterday:
This kind of micro-reporting won’t give you the war’s broader context — something that’s often inaccurately reported in any event — but following Dawes’s channel makes you feel almost as if you’re there. What impresses me most about Dawes isn’t just his physical courage, his obviously sincere sympathy for the people around him, or even the pathos in his humor, but the way he distinguishes himself from most other battlefield reporters by understanding enough about the weapons systems being fired around (and often, at) him to explain what’s actually going on.
When I read reporting from conflict zones, I find myself doubting the credibility of journalists who betray a complete technical and tactical ignorance of what they’re reporting. If you can’t see how this affects the quality of reporting from a conflict, just contrast the quality of Charles Hanley’s deceptive and inflammatory reporting from Iraq with dispatches like this, this, and this from Michael Yon. Among Yon’s many advantages over the likes of Hanley were a veteran’s understanding of his subject matter and an open mind. This isn’t to deny that Yon or Dawes are giving us their opinions with their reporting, only that they traffic in them openly, honestly, and factually.
In retrospect, whose reporting informed us better about what was going on in the ground on Iraq in 2007, as this country debated whether to abandon Iraq to terror and genocide? Contrasted with the work of most journalists in that place and time, Yon’s seems almost prescient. Who thinks that there would be anything for Dawes to cover in Libya now if we’d made a different decision in Iraq then?
Recently, many in the media have offered agonized confessions of how their industry misinformed us during the debate about invading Iraq in the first place. They did misinform us, out of a combination of laziness, ignorance, and groupthink. Had they done their job then, a majority of us might have opposed invading Iraq in 2003. Instead, a key link in our system of self-government failed us. It failed us again in 2007, when few of these journalists realized that they were already repeating the same error in Iraq for the same reasons. By 2007, they had become so obsessed with retrospective reporting about all they’d gotten wrong in 2003 that they lost touch with a new set of clear and present truths and consequences our country and our world then faced.
In war reporting, there is no substitute for knowing what you’re reporting about.
You may be right — the two dates might have confused me. But the videos coincide with the current fighting between Misrata and Zlitan.
I have to say that whenever i read journalism on topics I know something about it is just appalling. There tends to be a big herding effect with cut and paste churnalism and simply no fact checking and this always makes me doubt the reporting on topics I know nothing about. What amazes me is that most of these people have no real intellectual curiosity about the topics they are covering.
Yes, Danny, that’s one of the tragedies of our time. We rely on journalists to tell us about the world, and they’re not reliable.
I want to be fair to the good ones, of course. On Korea, for example, you have a cadre of true experts who cover the story. Many speak excellent Korean, have lived in the country for years, and have well-established relationships with many reliable sources in government and NGO’s. When there’s some big event in Korea, you can see the quality of the overall reporting decline dramatically when the dedicated Korea reporters are overloaded and non-experts parachute in to write about something they clearly don’t get.
Conflict journalism tends to highlight this particular weakness, because conflict is inherently the sort of crisis the media isn’t prepared for. But there’s also the problem that so few journalists are veterans, or have made a real effort to understand how militaries work, and how their weapons work. But I tend to see a perception in the journalism industry that the real expertise required is in writing, editing, and Strunk & White. Yes, that’s a good start, but covering Colin Powell’s speech at the U.N. ought to require something more than having Hans Blix in your Rolodex. Imagine how much better the journalism would have been if those covering the story knew how to read satellite imagery. Imagine how much better it would have been in 2007 if more of them had understood the weapons systems used on the battlefield, and had been required to read some books on counterinsurgency doctrine, which most of them clearly had not.
Maybe some day the great media companies will recruit journalists on the basis of their knowledge.
Meanwhile, we can be proud of Secretary Clinton and President Obama, who are withholding aid from Pakistan.
The link in your sidebar to ‘The Daily NK’ isn’t working. Adding a ‘/’ to the end of it makes it work as intended.
Wow, I made the news.
I’ll be returning to Libya on the 11th of August. More information can be found on my blog which is located at “http://misurata-thewarinlibya.blogspot.com/”. Please don’t hesitate to donate! Efforts like this are microfunded.
The entire reason why I had so much access was because my overhead was virtually zero and unlike the other swarming news people I didn’t get in the way.
I often confuse incoming and outgoing and initially don’t know the weapons systems very well. I learned as I spent more and more time there. The Libyans call 81 MM and other diameter mortars ‘Houns’ for example. It was a very steep learning curve but fortunately I was both lucky and met a lot of very nice people.
Kevin, Just curious, are you a military vet? Any insight into the situation in Brega?
Kevin Dawes is interesting, but absolutely someone you should not encourage.
His “battlefield journalism” is mainly about him. He practices medicine, including surgery, with no medical training whatsoever. He believes that there is a wide-ranging conspiracy, including the CIA, to oppress him. He is very, very mentally ill.
Please listen to Jared and do not support Kevin Dawes. He is a very scary, very sick man who performs surgery without a license or any training whatsoever.
Kevin Dawes, also known as Caro is incredibly mentally ill, and should not be encouraged.
hmm, a paranoid schizophrenic with no medical license running around a lawless war zone with a scalpel… can’t see any danger in that… you know, i have no military or medical training either, but i saw a movie about a surgery once and sometimes i like to read about guns, i guess that makes me a war medic too…