Choices

The Washington Post's Anthony Shadid talks with Terry Gross of "Fresh Air" about his response to pleas for help while covering the Israeli bombing of southern Lebanon. Here's the link.

Here are some excerpts...

Gross: When you showed up in towns that had been bombed or about to be bombed, did people ask you for help?

Shadid: It was amazing I guess the degree to which journalists had become - I don't want to say part of the story - but the degree to which journalists were within the story. Almost every town I went to people would ask me to give them a ride out. People wouldn't ask for money. There was such a dignity down there that I guess asking for money would demean them. But asking for a ride out, that happened all the time...

...It was this sense that there was nobody else there. The Red Cross was there, but they couldn't get in. The government was pretty much non-existent. Hezbollah does have a very organic relationship to these villages and there were certain activists there - Hezbollah activists - that were helping people out. But, as a journalist, you were in a place where the mechanisms of government or how government operates just didn't exist anymore and people were pretty much left to their own fate.

Gross: So, when people asked you for help getting out of town, what did you do?

Shadid: Well, I mean, we were working. It's always a struggle what you do in those situations. You are a journalist. You are a professional. At the same time you don't lose certain decency and when you could help, you would help. In one town I was in we did help some people who were trapped in there. We did give them a ride out to Tyre...

...But there was only so much you can do and it is frustrating. How do I put this? It does feel very bleak in those situations and you try to do what you can without maybe crossing the line of what you should do as a journalist. And often it's very little that you can do...

...I guess you kind of have to make those choices that you wouldn't want to make all the time.