It’s a Tuesday morning. Usual drill. Up, exercise, read, get the boy ready for nursery, get on my bike and head for the office. It’s around a quarter to four that afternoon when the “red drops” begin. These are the news wire services, telling us something important has happened. My editor is in my ear: “Check your urgent wires, getting some lines on Zelensky.” What now?
Russia’s Lost Sons (working title), an hour-long programme, was filmed over a year by filmmakers for ROMB, an independent Russian media outlet.
Women looking for their sons, brothers and husbands join forces as they contend with mostly unresponsive government offices. They are left searching morgues and trawling social media for news, in desperate hopes of finding those they have lost.
If we ever needed reminding that truth is the first casualty of war the conflict in Ukraine has supplied an abundance of misinformation and propaganda. War has also, wrote the historian AJP Taylor, just as reliably been the mother of invention for everything from battlefield hardware to advances in conflict journalism.
I overslept the beginning of the invasion on 24 February. The evening before, I was at the cinema alone: my nervous friend had declined, saying, “Let’s meet after the war!” Around midnight, four hours before the attack, I finished writing a story about Hollywood movie Dog, starring Channing Tatum, which was due to be released in Ukraine.
On the first anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Sir Lenny Henry Centre for Media Diversity and ITN held an invitation-only event to ask if the war had exposed a serious lack of diversity across newsrooms and what this meant for the journalism they produced?
At the start of the war, the Los Angeles Times wrote: “In the heat of war, a number of correspondents, consciously or not, framed suffering and displacement as acceptable for Arabs, Afghans and others over there — but not here, in Europe.”
Dooley is no stranger to frontline investigations, having previously embedded herself in the all-female Yazidi battalion in Stacey on the Frontline: Girls, Guns and ISIS. But her new feature-length documentary Stacey Dooley: Ready For War? will bring her closer to home.
The Ukrainian civilians first arrive in Britain to engage in five weeks of the British Army’s rigorous training programme. Dooley will see first-hand the emotional and physical challenges the young recruits go through as they learn survival skills and fighting strategies.
There are different kinds of fear,” says Quentin Sommerville, the BBC’s Middle East correspondent. “There’s the risk of getting kidnapped, the threat of roadside bombs and, here in Ukraine, the danger from shelling.”
As the Ukraine conflict again demonstrates, war reporting requires brave, experienced, and knowledgeable reporters and crews in the field, alongside exacting judgements and guidance from editorial and production teams back in the UK.
Channel 5 News presenter and erstwhile Dr Sian Williams - who has reported on wars, disasters and other major news events - who hosted the RTS discussion “The fog of war: Ukraine – broadcasters on the front line”, pointed out that, in the first three weeks of the war, five journalists had been killed and 35 injured.
A panel of BBC, ITN and Sky journalists examine the challenges of covering the war in Ukraine. BBC's Paul Adams, ITV's Rachel Corp, VICE News’ Hind Hassan and Sky News’ Jonathan Levy, chaired by Sian Williams, discuss how broadcasters and journalists deal with safety issues, access, verifying material and the difficulties of 24-hour news driven by social media and online coverage, all while remaining impartial, keeping their sanity, and not falling victim to propaganda.
The accuracy of the fire was surprising,” was the laconic observation of Sky News camera operator Richie Mockler. He was explaining what happened when gunmen, thought to be a Russian sabotage and reconnaissance squad, ambushed Sky’s chief correspondent Stuart Ramsay and his team. They were driving in a rented Hyundai saloon car on a major road from Bucha to Kyiv, about 20 minutes from the centre of the capital.
