E-COURSE: REPORTING WAR
Chris Booth
Former BBC Moscow and BBC Bagdad Bureau chief
Chris Booth has spent more than three decades working in multimedia content production. He was based in Moscow for more than ten of those years, working for Sky, NBC, Associated Press Television and BBC, culminating in appointment as bureau chief responsible for the former Soviet Union. After Moscow, Chris worked as the BBC’s bureau chief in Baghdad, as well as holding senior positions in the BBC World Service newsroom. In recent years, Chris has run a successful consultancy focused on media development, with a specialisation in journalists’ safety and wellbeing.
When journalists cover wars, they inevitably face multiple moral and legal dilemmas. These short videos are created by EU-funded media development project EU4IM and cover the ethical considerations of war reporting. They are guidelines, not formulas, and as such are not meant to be prescriptive as there are no easy answers when it comes to matters of life and death. These guidelines seek to prompt journalists and editors to structure their thinking when weighing up the best course of action in difficult circumstances. They are aimed to maximize the quality of reporting, while minimizing the risk of doing harm to others and themselves.