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WASHINGTON, DC, 10 March 2012 -- Here's the online version of a panel discussion in which my Foreign Correspondence class participated earlier this week. The discussion was hosted by Global Voice Hall, which seeks to foster discussion and dialogue between the West and the Middle East. See http://www.globalvoicehall.com/pangaea-american-university

Bill Gentile
The Backpack Journalist, LLC
Founder/Director, The Backpack Journalism Project at American University

Female journalists have made huge strides in recent years, but continue to face gender-specific risks [EPA]

London, UK - Our job as journalists carries with it an inherent risk that affects us all, irrespective of our gender or ethnic background, because we go to places and events that people are trying to get away from: disaster zones, violent confrontations, and unrest.

However, the way that that risk plays itself out can be gender-specific.

LONDON — I knew him through the time of the revolution, seated — perched really — at a round table in the Cairo bureau of The New York Times. He was never alone. He had no office. The old three-legged wooden table was not a desk.

The pressure over the 18 days leading to Hosni Mubarak’s fall never relented. Nor did his delight in what he chronicled.

Something sounds familiar. 'Long-range nuclear missiles', 'terrorist sleeper cells', 'WMDs': terms which quickly became part of the media's vocabulary in the run up to the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq. Fast-forward to 2012 and they are featuring heavily once again, only now it is not about Iraq, but Iran. Last time, the media's saber-rattling followed the Bush administration's lead in selling the attack on Iraq. This time, the so-called 'Iranian Threat' is a narrative being constructed by the US media all by itself - with scant public support from the Obama administration.

Two foreign journalists have been killed in Homs, as activists report the continued shelling of a district of the Syrian city, amid warnings of an escalating humanitarian crisis.

Anthony Shadid, center, with residents of Cairo last February.

Anthony Shadid, a gifted foreign correspondent whose graceful dispatches for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and The Associated Press covered nearly two decades of Middle East conflict and turmoil, died, apparently of an asthma attack, on Thursday while on a reporting assignment in Syria. Tyler Hicks, a Times photographer who was with Mr. Shadid, carried his body across the border to Turkey.

MY first winter here was cold and spare. It was 2001, a few weeks after the fall of the Taliban regime. I had been a foreign correspondent for barely six months, and never a war correspondent.

I packed with only the faintest idea of where I was going, other than to a bombed city and a frigidly cold house. I was taking over from an experienced journalist whose only advice was: “Bring dry soup, good ones. There’s almost nothing in the shops here.”

“And nuts,” she added.

IN Pakistan, journalism has become the riskiest profession. According to Reporters Without Borders (RSF), out of 66 journalists killed worldwide in 2011, 10 died in Pakistan.

For the second consecutive year, Pakistan has been declared the most dangerous place for journalists — more dangerous than even Afghanistan and Iraq.

In an atmosphere of unabated violence against journalists, where the perpetrators and the reasons for their ire are many, news decisions become more risky; journalists then take news decisions following a different set of values than what most newsmen do worldwide.

(VOA reporter Mukarram Khan Aatif shown in northwest Pakistan in January 2012. The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for killing Aatif in a mosque in Shabqadar, some 35 kilometers from Peshawar.)

The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibilty for the Tuesday killing of Pakistani reporter Mukarram Khan Aatif, who worked for the Voice of America.

Aatif was assassinated in Shabqadar, a small town located in the violence-hit Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, not far from Peshawar.

(Above image copyrighted by Alex Majoli)