Iraq Can Be a Deadly Assignment for Journalists

Jan. 28, 2007 — -- Journalists have risked their lives to cover wars for generations. But never have they had to face the risks they now face in Iraq.

2006 was the deadliest year for journalists in the 25-year history of the Committee to Protect Journalists, which recorded 32 deaths in Iraq last year.

"We've never seen a conflict like this," said Joel Simon of CPJ.

The risk for journalists is no longer simply being caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.

"Now," Simon said, "the primary risk to journalists is not crossfire, it's murder."

Anne Garrells has covered the war for National Public Radio since before the invasion. She is one of just a handful of Western journalists who remained in Baghdad during the first stages of the war.

"There was maybe a brief window of about six months when we could travel the country freely and talk to anybody," she said. "Then the car bombs began in earnest, and then we became the targets. We became hunted."

ABC's Dan Harris, who just returned from his sixth reporting trip to Iraq, said every journalist there is constantly aware of the risk.

Exactly one year ago, ABC News' Bob Woodruff and Doug Vogt were seriously injured by a roadside bomb as they rode in a military convoy.

Woodruff's recovery has been remarkable. The first doctors to examine him thought he would die. The language centers of his brain were damaged by the blast and, according to his brother Dave, Woodruff's first conversations were sometimes in his second language -- Mandarin Chinese.

Today, Woodruff is working on a book and a documentary, both to be released next month.

Vogt, who was less seriously injured, is already back at work.

Time Magazine's Michael Weisskopf had a similar close call. In 2003, he saved the lives of everyone in his Humvee when he grabbed a grenade that had been tossed through the window.

"Some instinct in me made me lunge forward and pick it up," he said. "It was so hot I could feel the flesh in my hand liquefying, and I instinctively began to fling it out of the Humvee. And just as I did, everything went dark. And when I woke up, my life had changed forever."