TOM GJELTEN: Thanks, Tina.

I have to say that I -- my instinctive reaction -- and when I'm asked to participate in a forum like this is to expound a somewhat traditional role of correspondents. I was asked recently, for example, to do a paper on how the news media can assist in conflict prevention efforts. And after giving it a lot of thought, my conclusion was that is actually not the job of the news media to help prevent conflicts.

And so, I guess I begin with a kind of an instinctive reaction of caution about volunteering to take on some kind of proactive role in a campaign to bring about an end. I think, for example, as war correspondents, our work very often complements the work of human rights advocates, but it is not exactly the same thing. In general, I say that our traditional role, our proper role is to describe and explain the world, but not to change it. And so, when I think about -- nevertheless, the question here is what is the role that news media can play in the prevention of genocide, which is a different issue.

But, my way of thinking about this question is to say that if we as journalists do our jobs properly in a context where genocide and war crimes may be committed, then our work will contribute to the prevention of genocide.

So, I would approach this issue in the following way, to ask: What does properly and responsibly practiced journalism mean in a war or crisis context? Because I think that reporting in a war or crisis situation, where we may see genocide or war crimes committed, is a different -- it is a unique reporting environment that raises some particular professional principles that distinguish that kind of reporting work from news reporting more generally. And I'm just going to take a couple of minutes to pull out a couple of points that I think this kind of reporting challenge raises.

I think in the first place, it is extremely important for reporters to be able to recognize what context they are reporting in. I have, as all of us do, a lot of experience reporting from war zones. Sometimes, you run up against evidence of genocide and war crimes, sometimes, you do not. All wars are not the same. All conflicts – all armed conflicts are not the same, and the first responsibility of a journalist is to recognize when a conflict or war one is covering is qualitatively different from other conflicts.

We're going to be talking later today on this panel about Roy's Crimes of War project. This is -- and I'm going to leave it to Roy to -- to elaborate on it, but this is the kind of project that will equip and train reporters to recognize war crimes when they see them.

So, the first -- the first special responsibility of war reporters, I would say in a situation like this, is to recognize when the context is unique. And once we recognize this, then what issues do we really need to focus on.

One principle that I feel quite strongly about -- and this stems from my reporting in Bosnia -- is it is extremely important for reporters to in a situation like not to be afraid of generalization. I think that reporters instinctively shy away from generalization, for understandable reasons. We are often criticized for over-simplifying complicated stories, and I think the people that make those criticisms have good and sound reasons to make them. But, I argue that the reverse is just as much a danger, and in some cases, particularly if you talk about a genocidal situation, the reverse is just as much as a danger, failing to generalize when you really have an obligation and the means to do so.

If you look at war reporting, you will often see a series of snapshot reports about what is happening in particular villages as though they were all discrete entities. You may read colorful reports in and of themselves that may give a very -- a very moving description of what has happened in a particular village. But, they often fail to explain -- they fail to provide the larger picture.

I think the guiding principle should be for a reporter in a situation such as this to seek the broadest generalization possible, while still remaining rooted in direct observation. For example, if I come upon a village -- and all of us at this table have had this experience -- if I come upon a village and find houses burning here and there, I can easily file a report saying that this -- that this town is sort of caught up in the tragedy of war, that there were houses -- that I saw houses burning, and go off and leave it at that.

I can even interview some people who are running away and they can describe how terrible it is to have their house burned around them and whatever. But, instead, I-need to investigate and find out which houses are burning in that village. I may learn as I would have in Bosnia, that it was only the Muslim houses-in a village of mixed population that were burning. Or, perhaps only the Croat houses, or in some situations, perhaps it was only the Serb houses that were being burned while others were being left alone. It is very important that I take that second step and be able to say that.

But, then, I should not stop there. I need to correlate that fact with others. People may have been rounded up in this village and chased away. It's very important to check out what kind of propaganda accompanied an operation like this. Reporters who took this approach of seeking to generalize from the first examples they saw, would have been able to come away from that village at the end of the day and have a story of ethnic cleansing as opposed to a story of yet another skirmish in another village. So, we need constantly to seek to generalize.

This to some of you may seem like a trite observation, but I think that if -- I think if you read the accounts of the war in Rwanda and of the war in Bosnia, you found many examples that would just leave readers or listeners or viewers concluding that war is hell, but that those people over there are probably just going to kill each other until they get it out of their system, there being no real effort to explain what is going on.

Stories that leave that impression, in fact, are safe stories, they're not stories that get you in trouble, as Ed was saying. No one will accuse you of taking a side, of being partial, of being opinionated, but you have not done your job. And the temptation to do ones' work safely and not to run the risk of being accused of being partial, of being opinionated, of oversimplifying is tempting.

And undoubtedly, if you do as I say, and if you do seek to generalize, it is a certainty that you will be accused of all those things. And yet, if you approach your responsibilities in a professional manner, I don't think that you can be deterred from that.

Another point is to have some -- another point of reporting in this kind of context is to have some sense of how genocide as a process actually works. And one of the things that we have learned from Rwanda and Bosnia is the extreme importance of propaganda, how essential it was for the practitioners of genocide to demonize the target population, to dehumanize them, and how instrumental the mass media were in this.

I think that if I found myself back in a situation where I suspected genocide was about to occur, I would pay particular attention to what was going on in propaganda, and that is something has often been neglected in the early stages of reporting.

And a final point, I think it is important to say what it is that we are witnessing. And I'm going to underscore what Ed said here today about neutrality. Somehow,.our readers, our viewers, our listeners need to get it. When something genuinely evil is happening out there, they have to be able to get that message. And this does go beyond the facts. I happen to believe that there is good and bad in this world. And I think that it is in a sense when you are -- when you as a journalist are confronted by something genuinely evil, somehow your reporting needs to communicate that fact. That is not to say that you resort to labeling, that is not to say that you generalize about good guys and bad guys, but somehow the moral significance of what you are witnessing needs to come across.

If there is something genuinely evil happening and you are the person who has the responsibility of communicating what is happening to your audience, somehow in the end, your audience needs to get it. They need to react to that -- to your news reporting with the same sense of outrage that you or anyone who witnessed it firsthand would.

Again, this is a hugely risky way to approach news reporting because sometimes 'we may -- it's possible we won't get it right. Journalism is an art, not a science. We may sort of trigger moral outrage prematurely in some situations; we may get something wrong.. Nevertheless, we cannot be paralyzed by that fear. I think instinctively we must be prepared to -- not to pronounce something evil, because that is different, but to convey the evil in what we are seeing.