What it takes to report stories from the war in the Middle East

0:00Kat Lonsdorf:It's Consider This where every day we go deep on one big news story. Over the past two months, NPR journalists have covered the war in the Middle East from more than a half dozen countries.

0:11Durrie Bouscaren:We've come here with the permission of Hezbollah. An Israeli surveillance drone buzzes.

0:16Kat Lonsdorf:Yusuf Mkdad, a 35-year-old father of four who tells NPR, I live in the street, in a tent, like most people in Gaza. Dual Israeli-U.S. citizen Ari Spitz lost two legs in an arm. The Iranian government has been so intent at tracking down protesters and the doctors who treated them. That last voice you heard was Duri Bouskarin reporting from Turkey's border with Iran. Blocked from entering Iran itself, she has spoken with dozens of Iranians about their experiences since the war began more than two months ago. Activists in Iran are struggling to get information out to the rest of the world. Meanwhile, a team of NPR journalists has been reporting from southern Lebanon, where Israel has destroyed towns and villages and occupied a large section of the country.

1:01Kat Lonsdorf:Israel says it is creating, quote, a buffer zone to keep Hezbollah from firing rockets or launching attacks into Israel.

1:08Durrie Bouscaren:The further we go, the more destruction from Israeli air and drone strikes we see. Rows of shops bombed out and blackened, tops blasted off high rises, whole buildings toppled to the ground.

1:19Kat Lonsdorf:Consider this. Covering a war is not easy. And it takes a whole team working both on the air and behind the scenes to bring you accurate, independent reporting from the front lines.

1:41Kat Lonsdorf:From NPR, I'm Emily Fang.

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2:52Kat Lonsdorf:It's Consider This from NPR. For this week's Reporter's Notebook, we speak with two journalists about the challenges of covering the war in the Middle East. Duri Bouskarin has been reporting from the Turkish-Iranian border, and NPR reporter Kat Lonsdorf has been covering the war in southern Lebanon. I started by asking Kat about how one even travels from the Lebanese capital of Beirut to southern Lebanon, the area Israel has occupied.

3:19Durrie Bouscaren:To get down there, it requires a lot of coordination. You can't just get in your car and drive down south and get to a lot of these places. You have to coordinate with the internal Lebanese security forces to let them know that you're going to be going, you know, as far south as you can. And then, you know, you're also coordinating with Hezbollah because Hezbollah largely controls a lot of these areas. And then this part of it is voluntary, but we are also coordinating with the UN peacekeepers here who then will talk to the Israeli military for us to say, hey, there's a group of American journalists with NPR who are going to be in this location.

3:58They're going to be in this location telling the Israeli military,

4:02Durrie Bouscaren:that we're going to be present and asking them basically if it's safe for us to go to some of these locations.

4:07Kat Lonsdorf:This is even before you start your reporting. Right.

4:09Durrie Bouscaren:There's a lot of conversations that need to happen before you enter any of these more dangerous areas.

4:16Kat Lonsdorf:And I want to turn to you, Duri. You have just spent weeks in eastern Turkey, right next to the border with Iran. What was that like? Was it easy to find people who wanted to speak to you? Not at all. A lot of these people were scared to talk to us because people who are in contact with foreign media in Iran right now are being hit with espionage charges. It's technically illegal to speak to foreign media if you're in Iran. So how do you convince them to speak to you then? I would love to hear maybe some of the more unorthodox or colorful ways that you're finding people. You just have to ask a lot of different people.

4:51Kat Lonsdorf:And we did that by going to the border and kind of trying to blend into the crowd, discreetly talk to people, share our business cards. At one point, when we were at the border, we realized that it was incredibly risky for us to actually approach people. We were told by other people that we spoke to that undercover officers from Iran had actually approached them later asking about us. And that was the signal to us that it was not safe. We were putting people at risk, basically, by asking them to speak to us. I may have heard a story, Duri, that you were using a dating app at one point to try to talk to people in a safe, private space away from prying Iranian government eyes.

5:32Kat Lonsdorf:Yes, that was kind of, it was the day after we, you know, were worried about putting people at risk. And we got back to the hotel and we were like, how, how are we going to talk to people? so we basically tried to match with every Persian speaker in our area and immediately you know when we matched that person would be told I'm so sorry to do this this way but you're not talking to one person you're talking to a team of journalists we're here and we're trying to speak to Iranians about the war and we realized this is very unorthodox but actually people were pretty cool. And we had some of our best interviews with people that we met that way.

6:11Kat Lonsdorf:It's normally maybe not ethical to try and reach out to an interviewee in a place they're not expecting, like a dating app. But in our case, we needed to find a way to give people the chance to accept or decline an interview in a private place that was kind of away from any potential government oversight. And to be clear, you were very upfront immediately that you were a journalist. Oh, absolutely. I mean, there's no way to not do that. Both of you are talking to people sometimes about the worst day of their lives, and you're seeing immense destruction in your case, Kat. You're talking about death.

6:52Kat Lonsdorf:These are heavy topics. And I know you both handle these interviews delicately and with sensitivity. But I have to ask, how do you as the reporter deal with those emotions after the fact?

7:03Durrie Bouscaren:I think you really try to focus on the person you're talking to. It's their time to have emotions and feelings is kind of how I look at it. My time to kind of process it and have the feelings about it is on my own time. You know, after I've written the story or when I'm back in my hotel room and I just kind of take a quiet moment by myself and process that however I need to process that. Sometimes that's crying, quite honestly. Other times it's just kind of sitting in quiet. Sometimes it's like calling my partner, my family, my friends and telling them about what I've seen. You know, the number of times just in this trip here to Lebanon that I've watched pieces of bodies pulled out of the rubble in the last few weeks.

7:47Durrie Bouscaren:It's more than I can count on one hand at this point. And that starts to take a toll after a while. It's hard.

7:53Kat Lonsdorf:I'm sure it's not possible to continuously disassociate forever. What about you, Dury? I try to think about the fact that if I wasn't there, if I wasn't aware of it, it would still be happening. And I think that if you do it right, journalism can really help people find agency and find a voice and have their needs and their experiences heard and validated. Speaking of voices on air, I realize the nature of our business means that there's a focus on the voice, the name of the reporter that gets on air. But there are dozens of people behind all of us, our producers, our interpreters, our drivers, our security staff, often who are local to the country that's experiencing war, who are supporting us and helping us do our reporting.

8:41Kat Lonsdorf:Tell us about that collaborative process. And I don't know if listeners realize, but NPR has that infrastructure, that teamwork set up across the Middle East, across multiple countries in Turkey, Egypt, Lebanon, Israel, and so on.

8:56Durrie Bouscaren:Oh, my God. I will take any time to talk about our amazing team that we have in this part of the world who I've had the great honor of working with for, man, years now. You know, we're all in a group chat together on WhatsApp, and we're just constantly feeding each other news and what we're seeing in our different areas. And we have this giant team of producers, local producers who live in the place that they are texting us from, talking to us from, and are constantly feeding us the information they're seeing. And then we have all of the reporters and correspondents in that chat, too, and editors, and everyone's looking at this chat.

9:32Durrie Bouscaren:And it's such a collaborative effort. It's a hugely collaborative effort, and we're running ideas by each other, and we're running thoughts by each other. And I think that's such an important thing to know about how we report from these places, is it's not at all just me out here with a recorder wandering around. There's a huge team effort behind it.

9:51Kat Lonsdorf:When we're doing this kind of reporting, especially in countries in this part of the world, The passport that you hold can often determine your access to a story and your safety while reporting that story. So some of our colleagues cannot be named on air for their safety. They're at a disproportionate risk of being either harassed online or actually targeted by security forces. and it's so hard for me to not name my colleagues on air right now because they are such, they're just like the backbone of the work we do out here and we would not be able to report these stories without their work and without the risk that they take.

10:33Kat Lonsdorf:That was Duri Puskarit in Istanbul, Turkey and Kat Wansdorf in Beirut. Thank you for having us on. Yeah, thanks so much. Thank you both. This episode was produced by Gabriel Sanchez. It was edited by Adam Rainey, and our executive producer is Sammy Yenigan.

10:59Kat Lonsdorf:It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Emily Fang.

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