In The Thick of the Fray
In The Thick of the Fray Rebecca Brown Abed | Manager of Input, Al Jazeera English
When, in early 2020, the news of a new respiratory virus began to make our bulletins, few could have imagined how our world was about to change. The first case of COVID-19 was reported in Wuhan in China on December 31, 2019. Almost two years later, we are still in the grip of the pandemic - it has affected all of our daily lives no matter where we are or what we do and it has had a massive impact on Al Jazeera’s newsgathering operation. Overnight, we were forced to rethink how we operate in order to ensure the survival of our journalism, our journalists and our channel and to make sure we told the story. Normal rules no longer applied. Suddenly, every deployment became high risk. Everyone had to carry personal protective equipment: masks, gloves, sanitizers. Interviews needed to be done at a safe distance with boom mics. We had to avoid crowds and markets, protest situations: the very places we would ordinarily be attracted to as journalists. Our bread and butter had been removed – and covering even a simple story was imbued with a new danger.
As the pandemic took hold, even stepping out of home to take public transport to the office became a risk. Reporters reported from home. Correspondents in the field worked in ‘bubbles’– with the same team – to avoid the risk of cross- contamination. Countries started locking down – sometimes with our journalists inside. Some colleagues were trapped overseas for months on end, unable to see their families, forced to isolate in unfamiliar apartments, telling their stories on Skype. As a manager of people who go out into the field to film and report on stories which are often dangerous, one of the biggest professional fears is that a team member gets injured or sick on deployment. With COVID-19, this risk became very real with every single story. It’s a dilemma: how do we do our duty and report the news, without putting our colleagues at risk in circumstances which are far from normal? We cannot rely on Medivac to airlift staff from danger because airlines won’t carry people with the virus. We cannot rely on state or private hospitals to treat sick staff because hospitals are overflowing
and many countries are experiencing shortages of oxygen. Put plain and simple: if a journalist contracts COVID-19 on deployment, they are at the behest of the local authorities, and they cannot take priority over any local citizen. And it has happened; we have had correspondents fall sick in several countries whilst on deployment. These are tense nights for us all, as we make calls and send flurries of Whatsapp messages, seeking
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