From the Frontlines

Summary

Podcast Summary: Throughline (NPR) – "From the Frontlines"

Original Air Date: October 2, 2025
Hosts: Rund Abdelfattah & Ramtin Arablouei
Featured Guests: Enes Baba (NPR Gaza correspondent), Frances “Frankie” Fitzgerald (Pulitzer-winning Vietnam War reporter), Walter Rogers (retired CNN journalist), Susan Carruthers (war media historian)

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Episode Overview

This episode of Throughline explores the perilous work of frontline war correspondents, tracing their roles and challenges from the Vietnam War to the ongoing Israel-Gaza conflict. Through interviews, personal accounts, and historical analysis, the show highlights how war reporting brings uncomfortable truths to light, the pressures journalists face, and what’s at risk when their voices are silenced.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Reporting From Gaza: Bearing Witness in a War Zone

• Enes Baba describes the extraordinary dangers and hardships he and other local journalists endure daily in Gaza, where reporting itself is an act of survival:

  • Journalists are deliberately targeted (01:00, 02:42), often lacking proper gear due to fear of being identified as press (02:42).
  • “You just feel that you’re gonna be the next person to be covered with white shrouds…and your own colleagues is [sic] taking photos of you, taking you to the cemetery…” – Enes Baba (01:17)
  • Almost all of the 220 journalists killed since Oct 7, 2023 are Palestinian; foreign journalists have been barred from entering (03:44).

• The dual burden of documenting suffering while experiencing it:

  • Enes recounts living amid continuous bombardment, collecting clean water, and reporting deaths, often with little or no food (41:11–44:08).
  • “You are documenting suffering and at the same time you are experiencing it in yourself.” – Enes Baba (41:50)
  • The psychological toll is immense—attending friends’ funerals who were killed as journalists (47:51).

• Barriers to reporting:

  • Israeli surveillance and direct threats, including drone warnings and calls from Israeli officials to evacuate (48:24).
  • Social media is unreliable due to infrastructure destruction; local reporting becomes critical for outside understanding (49:24).

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2. War Journalism Across History: Vietnam, Iraq & Beyond

• Vietnam War – "The Uncensored War" (08:02–22:45)

  • Early reporting was uncensored; journalists could freely access the frontlines.
  • Frances “Frankie” Fitzgerald recounts her freelancing days in Vietnam, emphasizing the challenge of centering Vietnamese perspectives in US-centric media (12:11–16:22).
    • "The American high command knew nothing about the Vietnamese." – Fitzgerald (14:02)
    • Details about napalm victims and other horrors were sometimes omitted as she feared readers would not believe them (17:24–18:01).
  • Landmark moments: Walter Cronkite’s famous broadcast after the Tet Offensive changed public opinion and politics (21:30–22:01).

• Post-Vietnam Shift: Censorship and Control

  • The Vietnam experience led US and UK militaries to never allow such uncensored reporting again (22:51, Susan Carruthers).

• Embedded Journalism in Iraq & the Gulf Wars

  • Walter Rogers (CNN) details his "embedded" experiences in Iraq, where reporting was tightly controlled (25:13–29:45). There were moments when management censored material to match the administration's narrative:
    • "Sometimes they would say, well, the White House won’t like this, so they tempered your reporting." – Walter Rogers (29:31)
    • “Would you use the word censorship?” “Yes. Yes, I would.” – Rogers (29:48–29:52)
  • Embedding was a response to complaints about lack of access in previous wars, but led to new forms of control (30:14–31:55).

• Role and Risks for Local Reporters

  • Local journalists take the greatest risks and do the “hard work” as foreign media retreats to safety (36:39–37:54).
    • “The people who are really doing the hard work of reporting on the wars…are taking on different kinds of dangers with incredible bravery…” – Susan Carruthers (37:27)

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3. The Power and Perils of Narrative

• Language and Allegiance

  • Discussion of how terms like “terrorism” shape coverage and the public perception of legitimate/illegitimate violence (34:08–34:51, Carruthers; 34:56, Rogers).
    • “…that powerful, delegitimizing tag [terrorism] does an awful lot of work…to silence voices…” – Susan Carruthers (34:56)
  • Journalists wrestle with questions about responsibility to truth, audience, employers, and humanity (35:43, 18:23).
    • “Is journalism’s role to push the conversation if that’s where the truth is leading?” – Rund Abdelfattah (18:23)

• Mental and Emotional Toll

  • War correspondents struggle with PTSD, substance abuse, and emotional detachment as coping mechanisms (35:52–36:01).
  • Finding humanity—covering "the enemy," working with local fixers, and the debt owed to them (36:05–36:39, Rogers).

• The Social and Political Stakes

  • When journalists are silenced or controlled, the truth is buried—literally and figuratively (02:14, Enes Baba).
  • Repeated calls for the protection of Palestinian journalists and opening Gaza to foreign reporters (45:03, 45:18).

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4. Memorable Quotes & Moments (with Timestamps)

• On grief and risk:
  “Maybe, I'm sorry to say this, but I hate to show my own emotions, especially when I'm talking about a colleague. Not because I'm... Now I'm heartless. No. We still practice our own humanity every single day.”
  – Enes Baba (46:36)

• On limitations of reporting:
  "What we are reporting here from Gaza is only 10% from the reality."
  – Enes Baba (46:01)

• On the purpose of journalism:
  "I wanted to give the voices of the people here, the innocents who are often reduced to numbers or headlines."
  – Enes Baba (50:36)

• On internal censorship:
  “Everybody had this internal censor which sort of said, you know, how far can I go with this?”
  – Frances 'Frankie' Fitzgerald (18:01)

• On US media control:
  “Would you use the word censorship?”
  “Yes. Yes, I would.”
  – Rund Abdelfattah & Walter Rogers (29:48–29:52)

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Timestamps for Significant Segments

• 00:49–02:14: Enes Baba recounts the targeting and killing of journalist colleagues in Gaza.
• 08:02–22:45: Historical analysis of Vietnam War reporting with Frances Fitzgerald and Susan Carruthers; antiwar movement and shift in public perception.
• 25:08–31:55: The embedding of journalists in Iraq; Walter Rogers recounts reporting constraints and censorship.
• 33:00–37:54: The evolving burden for local war reporters in Iraq and Afghanistan.
• 39:38–47:51: In-depth on-the-ground interview with Enes Baba in Gaza, highlighting the dual burdens, daily realities, and emotional toll.
• 48:24–49:24: Surveillance, threats, and interference with journalistic work in Gaza.
• 50:36–54:15: Enes reflects on why he continues reporting, his motivations, and perceptions of Palestinian journalists’ status.
• 54:15–55:06: Enes’ resolve to remain and report until the conflict ends or recognition of Gazans’ humanity is achieved.

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Conclusion

Through powerful narratives, personal testimonies, and historical context, this episode shows how frontline journalists bring the realities of war to the wider world, often at great personal risk. It examines how the stories that reach us are shaped by danger, politics, propaganda, technology, and structural biases—challenging listeners to consider what is lost when those voices are silenced and the stakes for journalists like Enes Baba bearing witness amid catastrophe.

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Transcript

[NPR Announcer]

This message comes from W.W. norton and Company, publishers of Playground. From the Pulitzer Prize winning author of the Overstory, Richard Powers, a panoramic novel set in the world's largest ocean playground, now in paperback wherever books are sold.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Hey, it's Ramtin. This is the first time in over half a century that NPR and its member stations are operating without federal funding. It may feel uncertain, but here's what is public media endures. Independent, resilient people powered. Whatever the moment, you'll still find us here telling stories that matter.

[Enes Baba]

I still remember every single time that one of my friends were targeted.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

We're just getting some breaking news now that a journalist has been killed in an Israeli army.

[Enes Baba]

Some of them, they got targeted their houses with their families. Gaza bureau chief Waela Dahdu lost his wife, two children and a grandchild. Others, they were sleeping in tents inside of the hospitals. News cameras were already trained on the.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Nasser hospital after an initial Israeli strike killed several people.

[Enes Baba]

A short time later, a second Israeli strike hit as first responders and journalists have already rushed to the scene targeting ap, NPC and international media like Al Jazeera and others. You just feel that you're gonna be the next person to be covered with white shrouds and your own colleagues is taking photos of you, taking you to the cemetery and after that returning to keep reporting and saying Allah Yerhamu, which means rest in peace and Hassan. When journalists are silenced, the truth is going to be buried with them.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

This is Enes Baba.

[Enes Baba]

Eneas Baba, NPR News, Gaza City.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Since 2020, Enes has been reporting for NPR from Gaza where he was born and raised.

[Enes Baba]

The Israelis started to open fire on all of the people.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Like the 2 million other Palestinians in Gaza, Ennis has lived the past two years facing bombardment, displacement and starvation when an independent UN inquiry has concluded is genocide.

[Enes Baba]

Often I'm reporting with no protective gears because your own protective gears maybe is going to make you more of a target for the Israelis. We move quickly, we move on foot. Sometimes we hide our press vest.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Journalism is under unprecedented threat worldwide, from Mexico to China to Ukraine, Pakistan, Sudan and Yemen.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

The Committee to Protect Journalists has said the killing of 31 Yemeni journalists in an Israeli airstrike last week was the second deadliest single attack on the press ever recorded by the committee.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Reporters Without Borders estimates that at least 220 journalists have been killed in Gaza alone since the Hamas led attack on October 7, 2023. That's more than were killed in the Vietnam War and the war in Afghanistan. Combined, and it isn't even close. The Committee to Protect Journalists says it's the deadliest conflict for journalists the group has ever documented.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

And almost all of them are Palestinian. Although some foreign journalists have embedded with the Israeli military, Israel has barred foreign journalists from independently entering Gaza for the last two years. The vast majority of reporting you hear comes from local journalists like Enes.

[Enes Baba]

But even under bombardment, we continue to report here in Gaza after. This is the reality of Gaza. If you can hear it.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Was that an explosion that I just heard?

[Enes Baba]

A helicopter is opening fire on the houses.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

How close are you to that? Are you in a safe place?

[Enes Baba]

There is no safe place in Gaza and there is nothing called where are you exactly safe or not? Because bullets do not differentiate and bullets do not know. That's me working for an American outlet.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

I'll be honest, I was pretty concerned for Ennis at this point. But he seemed almost unfazed. Death is a daily reality, a daily possibility for him. Throughout nearly two years of war, Ennis has run toward airstrike after airstrike to bear witness to the aftermath and report back to you and me and millions of listeners, something that reporters have been doing for over a century now.

[Enes Baba]

This is Trafalgar Square. The noise that you hear at the moment is the sound of the air raid siren.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

A year of witnessing the ferocious war machine that the Bosnian Serb Grumaga had unleashed. Hundreds of Taliban overran Barj Matal a week ago they did not like my reporting.

[Susan Carruthers]

Our journey begins in Port Sudan.

[Enes Baba]

Russian forces are trying to pressure Gostian Ternovka from three sides. We saw Massab's lifeless body lying on the floor next to the fridge.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Is this the press f ing coming here again?

[Susan Carruthers]

The press again so they can strike here again.

[Enes Baba]

Get the out of here.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

I'm Rend Abdelfattah.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

I'm Ram. I'm Tina arablouei. On this episode of Throughline from npr, we'll travel from the marshes of Vietnam to the Iraqi desert and back to the rubble filled streets of Gaza to explore how journalists navigate the pressure of politics and propaganda to report from the front lines of war.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

How they go about reporting the truth to people who may not even want to hear it. And what's at stake when they can't tell those stories. This is Cal from Chicago and you're listening to Throughline.

[Walter Rogers]

You are the history class I always wanted.

[NPR Announcer]

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[Enes Baba]

War in South Vietnam an ugly war in a far off place to which.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

The United States is deeply committed.

[Frances 'Frankie' Fitzgerald]

Part 1 the Uncensored War.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

It's 1964. US military advisors have already been in Vietnam for over a decade.

[Enes Baba]

By the spring of 1964, the Viet Cong had reached a strength of an estimated 60,000 troops and controlled nearly 68% of South Vietnam's villages and templates.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Successive US administration said they were in Vietnam to prevent communism from spreading throughout Southeast Asia, and things weren't going well. But most Americans weren't paying much attention to the conflict.

[Susan Carruthers]

This is a war that begins in a very sort of slow way that initially was largely ignored.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

This is Susan Carruthers, historian at the University of Warwick and author of the book the Media at War.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Jim Crow, political assassinations, voting rights, those domestic issues were much more top of mind.

[Enes Baba]

But then, on the night of August 4, 1964, President Johnson appeared on national television. Renewed hostile actions against United States ships on the high seas in the Gulf of Tonkin.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Following a disputed incident in the Gulf of Tonkin involving an exchange of fire between US Navigation and North Vietnamese ships, Congress, with near unanimous support in the House and Senate, then passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which authorized President Lyndon Johnson to escalate military involvement in Vietnam without a formal declaration of war. And suddenly the draft was ramped up.

[Susan Carruthers]

And more and more thousands of American men are sent there.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Which led more Americans to ask questions about the war. And news outlets responded, this is what the war in Vietnam is all about.

[Enes Baba]

American soldiers hiking their way through the sweaty jungles of South Vietnam, searching for an elusive enemy.

[Susan Carruthers]

And of course, by 1967, 1968 is a staple of the nightly news on television.

[Enes Baba]

It first appeared that the Marines had been sniped at and that a few.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Houses were made to pay. Film reels would be flown to Tokyo for quick editing and developing and then flown to the U.S. there were three main networks broadcasting news from Vietnam. ABC, NBC, and CBS. And the big publications like the New York Times and Time magazine also sent the reporters there.

[Enes Baba]

Blue didn't want to come to Vietnam, and he'd much rather be a businessman than a soldier. But right now, he's in charge of the lives of 21 men.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Most of the reporting focused on the US perspective, American soldiers, policy, military strategy.

[Susan Carruthers]

We might see Vietnamese peasants in obvious anguish, distressed, grieving. But mostly the Vietnamese who featured in American news broadcasts were silent.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

A flurry of alternative and international media outlets were also reporting from Vietnam. Many staff correspondents were headquartered in Saigon.

[Enes Baba]

The full fury of the war has scarcely touched Saigon. It attracts visitors, gis on leave, and even American tourists anxious for a feel of the war.

[Frances 'Frankie' Fitzgerald]

I remember the day after I got there, I was asked to a party on top of the roof of of Beth's hotel, the Caravelle. There was roses and champagne and all kinds of wonderful things. You'd think you were at home, you know, but then over the edge of the parapet, you could see these flares coming up and question was whether it was incoming or outgoing. You would never know till it happened.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

This is Frances Fitzgerald. She goes by Frankie. In 1966, Frankie flew to Vietnam sort of on a whim. She was 26, from a wealthy family and curious about the world. So she decided to take a break from her local reporting job in New York to travel to Southeast Asia, wanting to see the place where her father had deployed during World War II. She went to Thailand, Laos, and eventually landed in Vietnam.

[Frances 'Frankie' Fitzgerald]

I thought I would just spend a month there, do an article or two, pay my airfare back. But when I got there, I found I couldn't leave. I mean, I'd never seen a war before, of course, and was all too fascinating.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Frankie says she never really felt unsafe, even as one of the only women reporting there.

[Frances 'Frankie' Fitzgerald]

Some of the American Soldiers and the Vietnamese soldiers were kind of furious. I was there because they thought they would have to protect me, which I could understand. And some just felt that their macho was diminished because a woman was there. So they didn't like that. But journalists were allowed to go anywhere they could go out with the troops. Nobody was holding their hands or stopping them.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Unlike in previous conflicts like World War II, the US military made a conscious decision not to form formally censor journalists. They saw Vietnam as more of a limited conflict, not a full scale war. Every evening, a girl on spindle heels picks her way over the barrier of rotting fruit and onto the sidewalk. Frankie arrived with a still film camera and a typewriter she'd packed into her suitcase. And as a freelance journalist, she could pretty much report whatever stories she wanted.

[Frances 'Frankie' Fitzgerald]

It just occurred to me that the thing that was missing was that the American high command knew nothing about the Vietnamese.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Behind her, the alleyway carpeted with mud winds back past the facade of new houses into a maze of thatched huts and tin roofed shacks called Bui Fat.

[NPR Announcer]

One of the oldest of the refugee quarters.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

She got articles printed in the Village Voice, the Atlantic, the New York Review of Books, and the New York Times Magazine centering the Vietnamese perspective. So, so walk me through, like, how did you actually go about getting, getting that perspective? Because I'm assuming you didn't speak Vietnamese.

[Frances 'Frankie' Fitzgerald]

Well, I found, I mean, I found several interpreters along the way that wasn't hard to do because people wanted to do that. You make a lot of money that way.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

And how would you know if someone was a good interpreter if you don't speak Vietnamese?

[Frances 'Frankie' Fitzgerald]

I could feel it.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Frankie would travel around the South Vietnamese countryside with her interpreter, hoping to connect with people. But she wasn't always welcomed with open arms. Americans do not normally walk through the slums, not the real slums like those.

[NPR Announcer]

In the outlying areas.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

She remembers going into a community community where refugees were living in makeshift homes built on planks atop a marsh.

[Frances 'Frankie' Fitzgerald]

They were angry at being displaced from their villages and put in this marsh.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Gigantic sewers, lakes full of stagnant filth. And suddenly a pebble sails out and falls gently on the stranger's back. It is followed by a hail of stones. She began getting pelted with stones.

[Frances 'Frankie' Fitzgerald]

I was sort of offended by it in the sense that I thought, what have I done? But I could very well understand if I had to live in such a place, I perhaps would be throwing stones too.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

These refugees lose their lands, their families, their ancestral homes and the structure of their lives. Frankie says the key to finally connecting with people was just continuing to show up.

[Frances 'Frankie' Fitzgerald]

They would realize that you were not going to come and blow up the village.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

How did you approach fact checking either things that the local Vietnamese people were telling you or the things that the US Military or the Vietnamese local police were telling you?

[Frances 'Frankie' Fitzgerald]

Oh, sometimes it was absolutely impossible. You just have to do the best you could. Find other sources that said the same thing. I think we're given certain leeway by our editors. There was a rule that you couldn't prove anything in a story by quoting a Vietnamese.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Wow. So it was pretty explicit that if you. If your source was a Vietnamese person versus an American commander, let's say, yeah, the two statements are not equal.

[Frances 'Frankie' Fitzgerald]

Not equal, not equal.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

And there were times when she felt the reality she was witnessing would be too unbelievable to her readers.

[Frances 'Frankie' Fitzgerald]

I went to see the civilian hospital, and then, you know, I see all these Vietnamese on beds outside their rooms with terrible burns which they had from napalm. You know, to describe it right here is almost impossible for me. It was so awful, I didn't know what to do. I reported some of it, but just not the really gruesome details.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Why did you leave the most gruesome details out, do you think?

[Frances 'Frankie' Fitzgerald]

Well, because I felt there wouldn't be credible, really. I didn't have an organization behind me. Everybody had this internal censor which sort of said, you know, how far can I go with this?

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Is journalism's role to push the conversation if that's where the truth is leading? Or is it to meet people where they are until they're ready to hear the sort of bigger, ecstatic truth?

[Frances 'Frankie' Fitzgerald]

Well, it's probably to do the first, but at the expense of not having it printed at all.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

To one people, the war would appear each day compressed between advertisements and confined to a small space in the living room. The explosion of bombs and the cries of the wounded would become the background accompaniment to dinner.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

In 1972, Frankie published a series of articles in the New Yorker detailing her years of reporting from Vietnam that were then turned into a book called Fire in the Lake, which won the Pulitzer Prize.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

For the other people, the war would come one day out of a clear blue sky. In a few minutes, it would be over. The bombs released by an invisible pilot with incomprehensible intentions would leave only the debris and the dead behind.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

It was the first major book by an American profiling Vietnam, its history, its people, the impact of the war on them. At the time, Franke described the book as a quote, first Draft of History. Frankie's book was part of a chorus of reporting that had been fueling a growing anti war movement for years.

[Susan Carruthers]

So many Americans are not only opposed to the war, but vehemently.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Out on the streets, public opinion had dramatically begun to shift. Going into 1968, US troop numbers were at an all time high. And then came the Tet Offensive. Communist forces swept through more than 100 South Vietnamese cities, towns and villages. American and South Vietnamese troops fought them back and the north suffered huge losses.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

It was militarily a win for the US but optically it was a resounding defeat. Reporters sent back photos that shook the American public. In one, a South Vietnamese soldier stands over a North Vietnamese prisoner, pistol in hand, carrying out an execution. Another shows bloodstains, bullet holes and dead bodies. At the US Embassy, Susan Carruthers says.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

For much of the war in Vietnam.

[Susan Carruthers]

The news media was absolutely beholden to this Cold War template that the United States was there to try to prop up beleaguered South Vietnam. And that changes only really after the consensus on Capitol Hill itself has started to break down. Editors are more willing to sort of push the boundaries of the sayable, the showable.

[Enes Baba]

It seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

About a month after the Tet offensive, Walter Cronkite, the anchorman for CBS Evening News, known then as the most trusted man in America, recorded this broadcast after a trip to Vietnam.

[Enes Baba]

It is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy and did the best they could.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

After hearing this broadcast, President Johnson reportedly said, if I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America. And within weeks he decided to not run for re election.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

It was seen by many as a turning point. News coverage became overwhelmingly more negative, though the war would continue for another seven years, until 1975 with the defeated US withdrawing the last of its combat troops. Two years earlier, journalists were credited with and blamed for ending the war. They had risked life and limb, often without the safety of a military escort, to report the truth. More than 60 journalists paid the ultimate price for it.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

And Vietnam came to be known as the uncensored war.

[Susan Carruthers]

The obvious lesson that the US military and the British military, looking very carefully at all of this learn is that they should never leave the media to be uncensored in any future conflict that they're fighting.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Coming up, war reporting gets a makeover fit for tv.

[Enes Baba]

Hello, this is Dominic Palone from the.

[Walter Rogers]

Oil fields of Douglas, Wyoming. You're listening to Throughline on npr.

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[Frances 'Frankie' Fitzgerald]

Part 2 embedded.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

It's April 2003, a year and a half after 9 11. An overturned truck smolders on the side of the road, the bitter scent of diesel filling the air. The metallic growl of armored vehicles churns through the sand. Buildings pockmarked with bullet holes sit empty. Cruise missiles streak across the night sky. Operation Iran Iraqi Freedom is underway.

[Enes Baba]

Breaking news yet again. Southwest or west of the city of Baghdad? That is where we find Walt again. Walt, good afternoon there. What do you have? Hello, Bill. Serious American casualties in the battle for Baghdad this morning.

[Walter Rogers]

Great. Sleep deprivation. There's no privacy. You're in an armored vehicle or a Humvee, as I was in a Humvee.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

This is Walter Rogers, army sources have.

[Enes Baba]

Told CNN that the casualties are at least six wounded.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

He's a retired journalist who spent decades traveling from one conflict zone to the next, much of that time reporting on air for cnn. He flew to Afghanistan during the Soviet war there, Sarajevo during the Bosnian genocide, southern Lebanon during Israel's occupation.

[Walter Rogers]

It was Winston Churchill who said, there's nothing so exhilarating is being shot at and missed.

[Enes Baba]

We just heard an incoming. What the hell? Can you hear me, Atlanta? We just heard something shooting.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

While embedded in Iraq, Walter went where the American soldiers went, living with troops reporting under the jurisdiction of the military. And his dispatches often ended with this editor's note. This report was written in accordance with Pentagon ground rules allowing so called embedded reporting in which journalists join deployed troops. Among the rules accepted by all participating news organizations is an agreement not to disclose sensitive operational details.

[Walter Rogers]

Embedding is whatever limitations you ascribe to it. Embedding is always good because you get to see, I mean, you can tell propaganda the stuff when it raises its ugly head.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

The main reason given by the Bush administration for the invasion was that Iraq.

[Enes Baba]

Has weapons of mass destruction, a claim.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

That many media outlets, including npr, repeated in the lead up to the invasion. And that would turn out to not be true.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Now, looking back, some people will say the media, war correspondents who were reporting very much from the perspective of the US Military and giving weight to what the administration was saying were their reasons for going to Iraq. Some people now say, well, those journalists, they all helped sell the war. As someone who was in Iraq at that time reporting, what do you think of that?

[Walter Rogers]

Well, I'm reminded of an incident in Iraq at the end of this second or third week. And one of the things that I recall was that there were people who were trumpeting that first wave as a great invasion, that the Iraqis would welcome Americans with open arms. We would ride through in convoys in those Iraqi villages and there was no celebration, there was no welcoming the Americans there. And the public didn't want to hear that. So you can't tell people things they don't want to hear.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

But did you ever feel like if the truth is something they don't want to hear, it still needs to be said because it's the truth?

[Walter Rogers]

Yes. And a pox on management of the company you work for and tell you they don't want to hear what you're reporting because it didn't comply with the White House version of events.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Wow. What did that actually mean in terms of the reporting?

[Walter Rogers]

I can't go into much specifics on this, but sometimes they would say, well, the White House won't like this, so they tempered your reporting.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

So they would say, take this out, take that out. No, we don't want this shot.

[Walter Rogers]

Yes, don't say that.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Wow. I mean, would you use the word censorship?

[Walter Rogers]

Yes. Yes, I would. There was a definite effort in those days to skew the reporting of the reporter in the field and make it conform to what they felt the administration wanted.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

We reached out to CNN about this and they had no comment.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

The 2003 invasion of Iraq wasn't the first time the news media was accused by media watch groups and some journalists themselves of selling a war on behalf of the US government. It wasn't the first time journalists were restricted in their coverage either. In fact, embedding was actually set up as a way to offer more access to the front lines. Because the Pentagon had received such strong criticism for restricting access to journalists during the first invasion of Iraq a little over a decade earlier. And an explosive development near the Persian Gulf. In 1991, the US led a multinational invasion of Iraq after Saddam Hussein invaded and and annexed its oil rich neighbor Kuwait. This set off the first Gulf War.

[Enes Baba]

Something is happening outside. The skies over Baghdad have been illuminated.

[Susan Carruthers]

Of course there had been a whole revolution in communications technology, the so called CNN effect.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

During the initial strikes on Baghdad, CNN was the only network reporting lives beamed.

[Susan Carruthers]

Into your living room in real time.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

On camera 247 to tens of millions of viewers in the US and around the world.

[Enes Baba]

There's a lot of fire going up.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

And it puts CNN on the map in a big way.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Historian Susan Carruthers says this is when the US military employ the sort of.

[Susan Carruthers]

Full panoply of measures that will be wheeled out again in Afghanistan and Iraq of sort of forming the press into pools and having briefings, trying to make sure everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet, as it were.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

She says the irony is this was the early days of the Internet and new technologies like email and satellite phones were making it logistically more possible than ever for a journalist to do what Frankie Fitzgerald had done in Vietnam, independently report from the battlefield.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Still, most journalists chose to follow the military's rules and the few who didn't.

[Susan Carruthers]

They were liable to be accused of treachery, often by fellow journalists.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

The BBC, for example, was branded the.

[Susan Carruthers]

Baghdad Broadcasting Corporation by some British journalistic critics. And I think that's another very powerful disciplinary force. How other journalists often are so keen to whip their colleagues into if they think that they are reporting too far from the other side. So those sort of pressures to toe the line, to report from within a very tightly bounded patriotic nationalist framework, I think are remarkably persistent.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

When the first Gulf War came to an end in 1991 and journalists were reflecting on the restrictions the US military had imposed during the war, many journalists.

[Susan Carruthers]

And news Organizations say this was a devastating defeat for the First Amendment. We let ourselves be suckered into these arrangements. Then that critique is trotted out again during the much longer conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

The pressure that war reporters contend with is really complex. They might embed with troops because it's safer. It might give them access to places that could otherwise be out of reach. And they often have to weigh whether their reporting could put troops in danger. The same troops they're often traveling with, living with. And if you're a foreign correspondent, then you might be in a place where your country is the one dropping the bombs or funding the weapons.

[Enes Baba]

On September 11, enemies of freedom committed an act of war against our country.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Susan says there's another big factor in all of this.

[Enes Baba]

All of this was brought upon us in a single day.

[Susan Carruthers]

The incredible power of the word, the.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Label terrorism, the war on terror extends.

[Enes Baba]

Beyond just a shadowy terrorist network. The war on terror involves Saddam Hussein.

[Susan Carruthers]

If everyone sort of shares this idea that there are illegitimate forms of violence.

[Enes Baba]

In today's world, even a handful of terrorists who place no value on human life, including their own, can do a lot of damage.

[Susan Carruthers]

And there are legitimate ones that we in our uniforms exercise and have a monopoly over. And then there are opponents who are.

[Walter Rogers]

Terrorists now with different threat challenges our world.

[Susan Carruthers]

Radical Islamic terrorism, that powerful delegitimizing tag does an awful lot of work, it seems to me, to bring people quickly, to heal, to silence voices, to cause people to think very hard about whether they really want to show or say certain things. Where does allegiance lie? I think that's what it all boils down to, isn't it? Questions of how one appraises responsibility. To whom, exactly? And perhaps another even more diffuse layer of responsibility, which is, what do humans owe to fellow humans? In the face of catastrophic human suffering.

[Walter Rogers]

You don't want anybody to die. There's no joy in seeing people deriving on the ground or smelling their rotting corpses.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

A lot of war reporters suffer from substance abuse, ptsd, and a sense of powerlessness.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

So how did you cope with that reality?

[Walter Rogers]

You don't forget everything you learned in Sunday school. You look for the humanity which shines through. You cover Palestinians, you cover Iraqi refugees, Balkan refugees, Serbs, Croatians. You know, you always see the humanity, even in the person you call the enemy. That's why you have locals working with you and for you and keeping you honest, and you're ever in their debt.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Foreign reporters often work with local people to translate, explain the culture drive, gain access, stay safe, and find and report stories.

[Susan Carruthers]

Iraq and Afghanistan are good cases in point.

[Enes Baba]

With microphone and camera in hand, they are there for every skirmish ever.

[Susan Carruthers]

More of that work was offloaded onto local reporters as those places became more dangerous and as American coalition forces tended to retreat.

[Enes Baba]

Did you film that car bomb?

[Susan Carruthers]

To the relative safety of their fortified.

[Enes Baba]

Bases, more than 200 media and media support staff, most of them Iraqis, have been killed since 2003.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Dozens more have been kidnapped or arrested.

[Susan Carruthers]

The people who are really doing the hard work of reporting on the wars, people who are much more poorly paid than a British or American journalist, who are taking on different kinds of dangers with incredible bravery and commitment in their own countries for whom the stakes are exponentially higher.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Coming up.

[Enes Baba]

My story here is not only about being being a journalist or a survivor. I'm a witness.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

We return to Gaza with Ennis Baba.

[Enes Baba]

I'm a witness to where the light turned into darkness. This is Christopher from St. Louis, and.

[Walter Rogers]

You'Re listening to Throughline on NPR.

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[Rund Abdelfattah]

A few weeks ago, just before the invasion of Gaza City began, I was trying to get in touch with Eneas Bhabha, NPR's reporter on the ground there. He's one of the only remaining Palestinian journalists working full time for an American outlet. As you can imagine, nothing is easy in Gaza, and even patching a call through wasn't as simple as dialing a number. Israeli strikes on infrastructure have made Internet connections spotty in Gaza, so we couldn't use apps like Signal or WhatsApp to make the call. And regular calls in Gaza are monitored by Israel. The first few times the call would just drop. Then I got a few rings. One time my call was patched into a random conversation.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Hello?

[Rund Abdelfattah]

A few times I got this.

[Enes Baba]

The subscriber you have dialed is disconnected.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

And finally 20 or so attempts later, Enes called me from that phone number.

[Enes Baba]

Hello? Samani?

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Yes, yes, Samantha.

[Enes Baba]

Perfect, perfect.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

I'm trying to call this number that you called from and it goes directly to. Call ended.

[Enes Baba]

Welcome to Jalawad.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

It was kind of surreal talking to Ennis. I was sitting in my closet where I record because it's quiet and it occurred to me that it was kind of amazing that I suddenly felt like I was there with him.

[Enes Baba]

I'm sitting here to see the only place that we can see that we are still alive, to see that there is hope, there is life. Which is the beach, the sea.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Oh, is that what I'm hearing in the background is the waves?

[Enes Baba]

Yes, this is the waves and the sea. Same time, the wind of the sea.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

So in front of you you're looking out at, at water, at the waves and behind you what is the, what does the scene look like in front of me?

[Enes Baba]

Yes, there is the sea, the water, but also we do have the Israeli navy craft. It's so close to us it opens fire on us on daily basis.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

So if you tried to go in the water they could open fire on you.

[Enes Baba]

Even if you want to just dip your own toes in the water. Even fishing is prohibited here in Gaza. This is what I see in front of me. But behind me there is a newly bombed towers that's been bombed today by the Israelis. The destruction, it's daily thing. The street I walked yesterday might be bombed today. Maybe the building that might friends is living in can be bombed. It creates inside of you a dual burden being both a journalist and a survivor that's living in Gaza itself. You are documenting suffering and at the same time you are experiencing it in yourself.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

What does that look like for you to both live in these conditions under constant bombardment, struggling to find free and also reporting, you know, for NPR.

[Enes Baba]

I woke at around 5 to 6am every single day to try to collect my own water. It's the only thing to find clean, drinkable water. I need to find Internet in order to understand exactly what happened overnight. If there is an airstrike and if there is a death toll that's being at one of the hospitals, which by the way we don't have a real hospital. Most of the hospitals in Gaza City is totally destructed or partially Destructed and partially functioning. In the waiting hall of the Patient's Friends Hospital in Gaza City, dozens of mothers cradle their infants.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Israel is limiting and controlling the entry of pretty much everything going into Gaza. Fuel, medical supplies, food, even medical staff.

[Enes Baba]

From the hospital going to the morgue.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Every day, as part of his reporting, Enes counts the dead at the morgue.

[Enes Baba]

And from that government made me to do a story about the humans and how the Gazans is being living. Shihada says we haven't seen bread for ages. We wait for charity meals. If they come, we eat. She has not eaten in a week.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

She says, and as told me on many days he does all of this with almost no food in his system. Maybe a bowl of lentil soup or a few pieces of falafel.

[Enes Baba]

Now you're consuming your own life with each step. But when you are a journalist, you cannot stop. It's that adrenaline rush, it's that duty, it's that job that you dedicated yourself since day one, that you are gonna document every single thing that's happening in Gaza. And then neutral way, and I'm repeating that in a neutral way, you cannot even be as a journalist here in Gaza, you cannot be one sided always. You need to tell the truth. I'm passionate about the truth. If there is a strike and people that are being killed, okay, from a local rocket, from the Palestinians, I say that the Palestinians being killed by a.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Local rocket, I mean that's such an incredible burden and in so many ways, but also responsibility that you and other journalists in Gaza have carried. Especially since October 7th when foreign journalists were barred from entering Gaza.

[Enes Baba]

More than 200 media outlets all over the world and even the Foreign Press association and the Committee to Protect the Journalists, they issued a statement asking Israel why you didn't allow the foreign journalists to enter.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

The headline of the statement reads, quote, at the rate journalists are being killed in Gaza by the Israeli army, there will soon be no one left to keep you informed. And then demands three the protection of Palestinian journalists, the foreign press be granted independent access to the Gaza Strip, and that governments across the world host Palestinian journalists seeking evacuation from from Gaza. Israel's Foreign Ministry called the appeal a quote, political manifesto against Israel and said, quote, the reports we see in the global media regarding Gaza do not tell the real story there. They tell the campaign of lies that Hamas spreads.

[Enes Baba]

Trust me when I say this. What we are reporting here from Gaza is only 10% from the reality. There is too many airstrikes, there is too many massacres, there is non Stop. Humanitarian crisis that we're going through. And we as journalists in Gaza, after two years of reporting non stop, we need our own brothers, our own colleagues to enter Gaza to help us.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

How do you make sense of, you know, when you hear about another journalist has been killed.

[NPR Announcer]

Maybe.

[Enes Baba]

I'm sorry to say this, but I hate to show my own emotions, especially when I'm talking about a colleague. Not because I'm. Now I'm heartless. No. We still practice our own humanity every single day. And believe it or not, sometimes, and maybe most of the times, we show sympathy with the hostage villages in Gaza because they are living the same bombardments, the same famine with us in Gaza here. But just imagine that you are going to the funerals every single day. Entire families killed in Israeli attacks are being buried here on the grounds of the hospital. But this time is different. Most of them are my friends. Most of them. They were journalist fathers, mothers, sisters, Abdul Marwa, Abdul Kareem, Mohammed, Mahmoud, Tasneem Sham. My mother too are next to me. I'm thanking Allah that I'm not married. I'm thanking Allah that I don't have children because having that responsibility on my own shoulders is truly gonna be the hardest thing in my life to live.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Mm. It's something that.

[Enes Baba]

Okay, we need to end the call at the meantime because it's being monitored and at the same time it's being tracked. Okay, so I need to end the call and call you back. Okay.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

He was hearing beeps on the line. There are various theories on why things like that happen, including weakened infrastructure. Anyway, a few minutes later, NS called me back.

[Enes Baba]

Hello, can you hear me?

[Rund Abdelfattah]

I asked him if Israeli surveillance had ever interfered with his reporting.

[Enes Baba]

When I was in Rafah, in my own house, a quadcopter. A quadcopter is a drone that holds a gun and explosive and at the same time a microphone. It came, let's say, 50 centimeters away from my own window and decided to speak to me and demanded me to evacuate the area. Before that, an Israeli official called me and he told me that you are in a military zone and you keep reporting and they want you to go out of here, otherwise you're going to put yourself at risk.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Risk has always been part of the job for war reporters, and it's never been higher than for journalists in Gaza who are being killed at record levels. Israel also accuses some Gazan journalists of being, quote, terrorists. The Committee to Protect Journalists has said, quote, the IDF has a long standing pattern of making unsubstantiated Claims that many of the journalists they have deliberately killed in Gaza were terrorists.

[Enes Baba]

Without social media, no one will ever know anything about what is happening in Gaza.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Social media has given the world a more unfiltered stream of images and videos from Gaza pushing the conversation. We were seeing the word genocide being used in social media reels well before the UN commission issued its conclusion. Many U S based media outlets, including npr, do not call what's happening in Gaza a genocide. Israel has rejected the findings of the UN commission accusing commission members of being, quote, Hamas proxies with openly anti semitic positions.

[Enes Baba]

It took 60,000 people to be killed, more than 100,000 people injured. Most of the Gaza infrastructure and houses is totally destroyed, turned into rubble and ashes.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Social media like the Internet is often unreliable in Gaza and it in those moments, reporting like Ennis's is one of the few ways the outside world learns what's happening in Gaza. It's why he got into journalism in the first place.

[Enes Baba]

I wanted to give the voices of the people here, the innocents who are often reduced to numbers or headlines.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Ennis told me. Growing up in Gaza he often felt like so much was beyond his control.

[Enes Baba]

Because being a Gazan means that you are a cursed person. You were living in one of the biggest open air prisons ever. They called us animals and they are treating us less than animal.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

He has vivid memories of occupation and then a series of wars between Hamas and Israel.

[Enes Baba]

I saw the first tank in my life when I was 6 years old and there was a curfew from the Israelis and my own neighbors neighborhood for five days. We lived without water, we lived without food, we lived without anything. So our childhood was always filled with blood, filled with safa.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

His father is a longtime photojournalist for afp, a French news agency.

[Enes Baba]

So I was born with a camera on my own lap.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Ennis joined NPR because he wanted to bring the things he was witnessing to the outside world. World.

[Enes Baba]

There is nothing that drives me to keep going more and more, more than the people themselves, more than how resilience the Gazans are because this is not something new for them. This is something that they lived from 1948 when the Israelis took control over Palestine and they killed our own ancestors and grandfathers and after that we just displaced to Gaza here.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Have you ever felt at any point while you've been reporting like you as someone who is a Palestinian journalist in Gaza, you weren't on the same level as a foreign journalist coming in?

[Enes Baba]

Okay, this is, this is a hard one by the way, to be honest with My own environment. And at NPR they are totally supportive. We are trying to tribe of journalists. We are Jews, we are Palestinians, we are Muslims, we are Christians, we are from Gaza, we are from Tel Aviv, so we cannot make our work environment poisoned. But many of other colleagues outside of NPR, with other media outlets, they resigned because they felt biased from colleagues inside of the media outlet living in the.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

US consuming American media. You know, October 7th is invoked anytime that discussion about the destruction of Gaza comes up. And so I want to take a moment to actually talk about October 7th. And I'm curious to know what you remember about that day, October 7, 2023.

[Enes Baba]

The question is not what do you remember? The question is, have you ever forgot that day? It was was the day that truly turned our lives upside down, that no one in Gaza as civilians agreed on. But we are the ones as civilians that being punished. 1,200 Israelis killed that day and Israel killed 60,000 thousands people.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Is there a point where you think you would say I can't report on this anymore because it's my life at stake and I have to just get to safety and I have to leave.

[Enes Baba]

When I'm gonna leave Gaza, when all of this reached to an end, when Israel sees us as humans, when Israel treats us as a human. Otherwise I'm not gonna leave Gaza. I was born in Gaza, I was raised in Gaza. I growed up in Gaza. I graduated in Gaza, I worked in Gaza. The history is being written and now it's the time to stand with the right side of the history.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

That was Eneas Baba, NPR's reporter in Gaza.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

That's it for this week's show. I'm Ramtin Arabic.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

I'm Rund Abdelfattah and you've been listening to Throughline from npr.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

This episode was produced by me and.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Me and Lawrence Wu, Julie Kane, Anya Steinberg, Casey Miner, Christina Kim, Devin Kadayama, Irene Noguchi.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Voelkel. The episode was mixed by Robert Rodriguez.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band Drop Electric, which includes Naveed Marvi, Sho Fujiwara, Anya Mizani. Thank you to Al Jazeera, Daniel Estrin, Enez Baba, Dede Skanke, James Heider, Tony Cavan, Nadia Lancy, Laura Schwartz, Johannes Durgi, Edith Chapin and Colin Campbell.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please Write [e-mail] and make sure to follow us on Apple, Spotify or the NPR app. That way you'll never miss an episode.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Thanks for listening.

[NPR Announcer]

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