By: Donald W. Pine, IREX Print Consultant

There were some uncomfortable silences.

The first morning of the two-day investigative reporting seminar for eight Bosnian television journalists and their two IREX trainers was over. The morning had been spent laying the groundwork for how to do challenging investigative work in a country where intimidation was common from subjects, and even editors and publishers.

Trainers insisted they had confronted the same problems at U.S. outlets.

Seminar participants insisted that the post-war Bosnian environment made journalism choices much more difficult.

The investigative reporting seminar in Sarajevo, and another on post-conflict reporting in Neum on the Bosnian coast of the Adriatic a week later, took place three weeks after the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. Doing journalism under wartime conditions on your home turf, a commonplace to Bosnians, was a concept the American journalists were just confronting.

Does the journalist’s job change when the stakes get higher?

As the morning session of the TV seminar continued, Bosnian TV reporters went over some of their choices. Sanel Kajan, a reporter from RTV-Mostar, traveled last May to Trebinje in the Bosnian Serb republic to cover the rebuilding of the Osman Pasa mosque, which was ardently opposed by Serb demonstrators. Kajan and his partner were suddenly faced with angry Serbs pointing guns in their faces. Fortunately, Kajan’s partner was also a Serb and the demonstrators took the Muslim Kajan for a Serb too, and the pair was released unharmed.

The effort to be the first on the scene and to get a true report of the mosque opening controversy simply was not worth the risks, Kajan concluded. The seminar group added that surely the U.S. trainers did not understand that reporting in Bosnia could get a journalist killed or maimed. It appeared to the group that the American ideals of an independent press discussed that morning were ill suited for any kind of journalism in Bosnia.

“A lot of the principles we take for granted in the U.S. just don' t exist in Bosnia,” said Paul Adrian, an investigative reporter for KDFW in Dallas, and a seminar trainer, “like the fact you do the story no matter what.”

By lunchtime, the silences were gone but so too were the polite smiles. The group insisted the afternoon needed less theory and more nitty-gritty to bring theory down to practice.

Denis Vila from RTV-Mostar offered a real dilemma he would have to face the next week. A source had tipped him to sabotage by workers at a local factory. He had confirmed the story but the factory owner was trying to make a deal with the workers. If the reporter revealed the controversy, the owner threatened to fire all the workers. Vila said he was faced with a decision on whether to risk the livelihoods of the workers, some of whom he knew personally, for a story.

Was the story worth the suffering of the real lives of his subjects?

The trainers suggested that a journalist’s job was to provide accurate information and not to make moral or political judgments for his viewers, and that that commitment might cost his subjects their jobs or even himself some condemnation and personal risk.

The trainers stressed that Bosnian journalists had to school their audiences to expect real information from their media, not just the opinions their audiences expected dressed up as news.

“The reason you want to follow the basics is that you are building your long-term credibility with your viewers or readers,” Adrian said, “and for journalism to succeed in Bosnia they will have to do that.”

Finally, Vila did not have to face the story decision as a reporter. Ironically, the next week his role was reversed. He was reassigned to help in a BBC training program teaching the basics to other Bosnian journalists. In the process, theory and practice, he said, had made a connection.

“I found the solution in our seminar after thinking about our discussion for a couple of days,” Vila said recently. “Now, I am using the factory situation as a training example to show that journalists must be interested in the facts, the truth, and they don’t think about consequences.”

Vila added that the concept was not an easy sell to his peers, who believed that American reporters lived in a different professional world. But he said that the seminar had convinced him that he would have had to do the factory story if he had not been reassigned.

“We tried to express that the fundamentals of journalism work anywhere and they are just as important in Bosnia as in the U.S,” Adrian said of the IREX trainers. “And that even though things may seem easier in the U.S., we do face some of the same battles.”

The next weekend in the coastal city of Neum, an expanded group of TV, radio and print journalists, including some from the Sarajevo TV seminar, found out how universal basic journalism can be.

IREX trainers presented the challenges faced by journalists in covering the U.S. civil rights movement in the 60s, the Northern Ireland conflict and the recent attacks on the World Trade Center.

In its first confrontation with war on U.S. soil since Pearl Harbor, the media reaction to the September 11 terrorist attacks showed how it was not immune from nationalism or prejudice.

The group listened to a review of how American journalists in the opening hours of coverage of the trade center attacks were victims of subtle prejudice against Arab-Americans, manipulation by the White House and media control by the U.S. military.

If the American press could be so easily influenced, asked one exasperated Bosnian reporter, how were Bosnians supposed to resist the intense pressures of their fractured society? The question started a passionate discussion of practical ways to report the facts and resist political pressures in cities and even newsrooms that often reflected Bosnia’s intense ethnic divisions.

The process has already started at Radio Studio 88 in Mostar, reporter Tina Jelin told the group. In the city ravaged by Serbs during the war and still divided between Bosian Croats and Muslims, the station has staff from all three minorities working in the same newsroom.

The Radio 88 staff were faced with a basic journalistic choice when the Croat half of the city raised a 33-meter high cross on the city’s most prominent mountain to celebrate Christmas 2000. The Muslim half of the city started a petition to remove what they saw as a symbol of Catholic Croat domination over the city. The easiest decision for Radio 88 was to forget the story in a country and a city where every side expects their news to have the “right” opinion.

“The staff did not want to skip such an important issue,” Jelin said. “Therefore they decided to present arguments of both sides without comments, using the opinions of the ‘ordinary citizens’ which they collected on the street.”

But the same effort to overcome divisions could not be said of the journalists at the Neum conference, Jelin and others pointed out. The Bosnian journalists in the room didn’t even know each other, let alone use each other as a resource to resist pressure on editorial decisions.

During a break in the meeting, one reporter said privately, he had a story idea that he couldn’t even mention in the group for fear that his fellow journalists would retaliate professionally against him.

But the passionate exchanges that afternoon in Neum have led to evidence of a new spirit, according to Jelin.

“The most important thing is that all those journalists from the conference are now in contact with each other and they are giving information to each other,” Jelin said recently by phone from Mostar.

“That is good a sign.”