Being There   

Reporting from the war zone--dangerous and essential.

Searching for the truth.

It sounds like an awfully high-toned description of a profession some think is peopled heavily by elbows-out, large-egoed cynics who grouse about their editors and live or die depending on where their stories are played.

Of course, anyone who knows journalists knows that the cynicism often--not always--masks a romantic determination to right wrongs, to help the needy, to bring down the bad guys, to help readers and viewers make sense of their world.

To find the truth. Sometimes the search involves painstaking, mind-numbing searches of vast, baffling collections of public records or frustrating rounds of lonely door-knocking, not to mention sitting through crushingly boring council meetings and shivering at heartbreaking crime scenes. (We'll talk about the festivals and the parades and the spelling bees some other time.)

And sometimes it means staring into the heart of darkness.

Which brings us to Daniel Pearl, who paid the ultimate price for the search.

Danny Pearl, by all accounts, was not your macho buccaneer war correspondent, drawn moth-to-the-flame style to the adrenaline rush of the battlefield. Indeed, he was abducted not in Afghanistan but in Pakistan, far from the fighting.

What the Wall Street Journal correspondent really loved was the great read, the offbeat yarn, the quirky tale.

But there was a war on, a war on terrorism, and Danny Pearl was covering it. And he was a casualty. But a different type of casualty in a different type of war, a political casualty set up for execution, not the accidental victim of a stray shot in the war zone.

Not long after Pearl's grisly death, the Toronto Star's Kathleen Kenna was seriously wounded by shrapnel, the victim of a grenade thrown into a van filled with reporters covering the fighting. The next day came warnings of threats to kidnap journalists in retaliation for the campaign against al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Pearl was awaiting the birth of his first child. Kenna was traveling through the war zone with her husband. In a gripping account of the incident, Star photographer Bernard Weil wrote that Kenna and her husband cuddled like newlyweds in the days before the attack.

With so much to live for, why would they put themselves at risk? Why would Kenna venture into combat situations where journalists are more likely to be seen as targets than as neutral observers? Why would Pearl meet with shadowy figures in militant Islamic groups?

Because that's what journalists do. As Ann Cooper, executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, told AJR senior writer Sherry Ricchiardi, "It's a terribly important story, and it has to be covered" (see "Dangerous Journalism," page 28).

And the only way to cover it is by being there. That's particularly true in the current war, where the Pentagon has hardly been forthcoming with information and access, and al Qaeda and the Taliban aren't exactly what you would call objective sources.

The question of civilian casualties is a window into why on-the-scene reporting is essential. Liberal commentators in this country and news organizations and Web sites around the world have taken numerous shots at the U.S. "corporate media" for covering up or downplaying stories about noncombatants killed in the fighting. Meanwhile, the foreign press has played up civilian casualty stories, big time. And a study by a University of New Hampshire professor found more than 3,700 civilian deaths.

But under scrutiny these harrowing totals shrink dramatically. As AJR contributing writer Lucinda Fleeson reports (see "The Civilian Casualty Conundrum," page 18), the professor's study was not based on firsthand reporting; for the most part, he tallied up totals from reports posted on the Web. Those, in turn, were often recycled from other publications and Web sites, many without correspondents anywhere near Afghanistan, or based on figures released by, say, the Taliban.

The Associated Press, in a commendable effort to sort things out, loosed its correspondents throughout Afghanistan. Their digging suggested a total closer to 500 or 600.

Some of the best reporting on the issue has been done by the journalists like the ones Fleeson chronicles who made the dangerous trek to Uruzgan. There they found that U.S. Special Forces had attacked the wrong target and killed the wrong people.

It's a risky, uncomfortable, frustrating process.

But it's the only path to the truth.