FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

The James Foley Videos Worth Watching

It's worth remembering the late reporter for his motivation and dedication, not what ultimately happened to him.

In the last years of his life, the intrepid war journalist James Wright Foley was no stranger to captivity. In April 2011, a year and a half before was taken captive in Syria by ISIS forces, he was captured in Libya by fighters loyal to then-dictator Muhammar Gadaffi.

"It was a kind of siren song that called me out to the front lines," the New Hamphire native  told students at his alma mater, Marquette College, in December 2011, before returning to the Middle East to report for Global Post and the AFP.

Advertisement

"It's not enough to see it from the distance," Foley said.

In a video interview by the  Boston Globe (above) Foley describes the 2011 ambush that led to the death of South African photojournalist Anton Hammerl (it was likely a war crime) and began his 44-day captivity, along with two other journalists, in a prison in Gadaffi-stronghold Tripoli. "Mentally, it was tough because you have to get over the fact that you're part of a team and one of your members died," he said.

You go through different emotions when you're in captivity. On the one hand you say, my career is over. On the other hand, you say, my career's just started. See with these weird extreme ideas of where you are based on this capture. You don't want to be defined as that guy who got captured in 2011.

I believe frontline journalism is important. Without these photos and vidos and firsthand experience we can't really tell the world how bad it might be. without the reporters, Benghazi might have been invaded and might have been a massacre. The UN and NATO intervened.

These kinds of things are very important to me. But my friends and family did so much. I want to take the time to really thank them really be with them and understand what they went through. They put their lives on hold and tried to initiate a media campaign for me. … These kinds of things I'm astaounded by everyday, just because one of their good friends got captured, made a bad decision that day.

Advertisement

The interview is a sobering document of Foley's courage and his dedication to frontline reporting and to the family and friends who supported him. It's also the most powerful antidote so far to  the video released by ISIS that's now been banned by parts of the internet, for fear of helping spread ISIS propaganda. In his own words, Foley offers a thoughtful reminder of the perilousness of reporting, in spite of global protections and threats of war crime tribunals, and the lack of a strategy, both diplomatically and within the media industry, for coping with journalist kidnappings.

Foley is the 70th reporter to have been killed in Syria since March 2011, in addition to at least 20 journalists who have gone missing; at least 1,070 media workers have been killed on the job since 1992.

Foley "was taken by an organized gang after departing from an Internet cafe in Binesh, Syria," on Nov. 22, 2012, according to the FBI. In the same video in which it beheaded Foley, ISIS threatened to kill another journalist, Steven Joel Sotloff, a contributor to TIME. Another missing American reporter, a freelance journalist named Austin Tice, disappeared in August 2012 outside Damascus.

Foley is the 70th reporter to have been killed in Syria since its civil war began in March 2011, in addition to at least 20 journalists who have gone missing, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. By modest estimates, the CPJ says, at least 1,070 media workers have been killed on the job globally since 1992. The worst years have been 2009 and 2012, when 74 journalists died in both years. So far in 2014, at least 30 journalists have been killed on the job.

Advertisement

Many more reporters are locked up by both governments and militants: more than 200 reporters were in prison in 2013, the second-worst year ever, according to the CPJ, after 2012, when 232 were locked up. Turkey imprisons the most—40 incarcerated journalists in 2013—followed by Iran with 35 and China with 32. Among the countries that have imprisoned the most bloggers, Reporters Without Borders estimates that China has imprisoned 75 netizens, and Vietnam and Iran have each imprisoned 33. (Earlier this year, a pro-Russian militia in Ukraine held my colleague Simon Ostrovsky captive for a week; as we have seen recently, in Ferguson, MO, detentions of journalists by the police happen in the United States too.)

The threat to journalists in Syria has led many media organizations to pull out. "This climate is making many journalists think twice about reporting from the conflict. With most major news agencies pulling their staff journalists out of Syria, the burden is increasingly falling on freelance and citizen journalists,"  Canadian journalist Jose Gonzalez wrote in April.

Another video worth watching: one of the last Global Post reports that James Foley filed from Libya, about the brutal demise of Gaddafi, after having spent 44 days in one of the dictator's prisons. At the end, he warns of the kind of combustible anger that lingered after Gadaffi's fall, and that helped contribute to the civil war in Syria that has killed over 150,000, and to the rise of the Islamic State that would devastate Iraq and eventually kill Foley.

Advertisement

"Many worry [Libya] will be unable to mend divisions that this long battle may have only made worse," he says in his report. "Peace is spread by rivalries, not just between those loyal to Gaddafi and those who have fought him, but also between rebel factions."

A final telling Foley appearance is his address to students at Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism in June 2011, just days after his release from Libya. He covered a range of topics, but his remarks around the 37:00 mark, after he was asked about risk taking, would prove deeply prophetic.

"This is what you have to be careful about," Foley said. "You have a close call. You need to really look at that. That's pure luck that you didn't get killed there. Pure luck. You need to either change your behavior right there, or you shouldn't be doing this, because it's not worth your life. It's not worth you mother and your father, your brother and your sister bawling."

Read more:

Video: State of Emergency: Ferguson, Missouri (Dispatch 1)

Tim Hetherington Was Not Interested in Photography Per Se 

Tim Freccia On Life and Death

Video: Libya in Vitro