How Reuters and Other Newsrooms Reacted

Picture the morning from inside a newsroom that had lost two colleagues in 2007 and spent three years asking to see what happened. You learn the answer from a live stream of a press conference held by an organisation you have never worked with.

Where Reuters actually stood

The agency had confirmed the deaths of Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh within a day in July 2007 and had been pressing ever since, first informally and then through freedom-of-information requests.

It had received briefings and an account of the engagement. It had not received the recording. That refusal ran for nearly three years.

When the footage was published the agency confirmed that the two men in it were its staff, and renewed its call for a full and independent investigation into how they died. No such investigation was held.

• 13 July 2007: Reuters confirms the deaths and starts asking.
• 2007–2010: formal requests refused, deferred or answered without the recording.
• 5 April 2010: the agency sees it at the same moment as the public.

The uncomfortable question for every newsroom

Freedom-of-information litigation is slow and costly and rarely produces a story in a useful timeframe. Most newsrooms file, wait, appeal once, and move on. The system is designed to be survivable for the institution holding the records, and it usually is.

The comparison nobody in journalism likes

A well-resourced, three-year, entirely lawful effort produced nothing. A single unlawful act produced everything. That is either a verdict on the mechanisms available to journalism, or on how hard newsrooms push. Probably both.

How other outlets handled it

The shift in coverage happened fast, and the parts of the morning that lacked a named victim were the parts that disappeared first.

What press-freedom organisations did with it

They widened the frame. Groups that track journalist deaths used the release to make a point about the pattern rather than the incident: Iraq was the deadliest conflict for reporters they had ever counted, most of the dead were local staff, and deaths caused by military forces almost never produced a prosecution.

That argument was harder to dismiss with a specific recording attached to it. The numbers behind it are here.

The partnerships that followed

Within months, several large newspapers were working directly with WikiLeaks on the field-report releases. That was a considerable shift for institutions that in April had been describing the organisation as an outsider with a political agenda.

The partnerships collapsed within a year over redaction and control. What survived was the method: consortium review of large document sets, staged publication, and source documents published alongside reporting.

Reporting on the deaths of your own colleagues

There is an editorial difficulty here that rarely gets discussed. An agency reporting on the killing of its own staff is in a genuinely awkward position: it is both the news organisation and an interested party.

Handled badly, that produces either advocacy dressed as reporting or an overcorrection in which an outlet underplays a story because it fears looking self-serving. Newsrooms generally deal with it the way Reuters did, by separating the agency's statements as a party from its journalists' reporting as journalists, and by letting other outlets carry the hardest claims.

It is worth noticing what that costs. The organisation with the strongest motivation to pursue this story was also the one least able to campaign on it without being accused of bias, which quietly weakened the pressure at exactly the point it mattered most.

What Reuters and the rest of the profession took away

Three practical things. Build a way to receive material anonymously. Learn to handle volume. Publish the documents alongside the story.

And one thing it has not resolved. The mechanism a news organisation is supposed to use when a state kills its employees still does not work, and nothing since 2010 has made it work. An agency in the same position tomorrow would file the same requests, receive the same exemptions, and wait. The only reason anyone knows what happened to two Reuters staff on 12 July 2007 is that a stranger broke the law. Whether that was the right thing to do is the argument this section keeps returning to.