Friends of journalists who have died covering the violent Arab Spring uprisings are trying to put their grief to good use. They are putting together an online campaign called “A Day Without News†to persuade the public to pay attention to the sacrifices journalists make.
They’ve received help from organizations like the Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Without Borders. But this initiative, they say, is more personal. It was inspired after a United Nations exhibition on press freedom last August, when an executive from Getty Images was talking with media industry friends. “I suggested that we try and create a campaign using the groundswell of emotion and anger at the recent losses,†said the executive, Aidan Sullivan, a vice president of photo assignments at Getty, who subsequently led the effort.
The “Day Without News†name was created by David Friend, an editor at Vanity Fair, who said it was meant to convey this situation: “Imagine a war without photographs. Imaine a conflict zone where no correspondent ever dared venture. Imagine a humanitarian crisis that came and went without eliciting a flicker of video, not a second of audio, not a single news story, not a lone blog post. Imagine war crimes without witness â€" atrocities whose perpetrators were held forever unaccountable.â€
“That,†he said in an e-mail, “is the situation we may face if journalists in conflict zones continue to be targeted by warring factions.â€
The campaign Web site, ADayWithoutNews.com, was unveiled last week. It has signed up dozens of prominent supporters, including the United Nations secretary general Ban Ki-moon, the Getty Images chief executive Jonathan Klein and the CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour. Several contributors to The New York Times are among the supporters.
The start of the campaign was timed to the one-year anniversary of the day Marie Colvin, a correspondent for The Sunday Times of London, and Rémi Ochlik, a French photographer, died while co! vering the conflict in Syria. “Paul Conroy, who had been with Marie and suffered grave injuries, reported that they had been purposely targeted by Syrian forces,†Mr. Sullivan said in an interview.
The Committee to Protect Journalists said that 28 journalists died in Syria in 2012. Most were local people or freelancers. On Sunday, another journalist, a French freelance photographer named Olivier Voisin, was reported to have died there after being wounded by shelling.
Raising awareness of journalist casualties is one goal of the campaign. Another is to discourage the targeting of journalists by encouraging prosecutions of such activities. To that end, Mr. Sullivan said he and the other organizers are lobbying members of the United Nations for changes to the legal language involving war crimes to include journalists.
