DYING TO TELL THE STORY
Terry Lloyd

One of the most damning indictments of the media profession used to be that reporters provided the ink and others provided the blood. Over the last five years that has been comprehensively overturned. At one stage during the current Iraq conflict proportionately more reporters and cameramen had been killed than members of the military. There are eighteen names on our Iraq War Memorial in St Bride’s and many have been killed since November 2003. One of those names is Terry Lloyd.

Lloyd was a veteran news correspondent of twenty years, working for ITV. He died on 22nd March 2003 when his vehicle came under fire in Southern Iraq. He was 50 years old. His cameraman Fred Nerac and translator Hussein Osman were almost certainly killed with him.

The greatest tribute we can pay to those who displayed great courage and put themselves in harm’s way in order to inform and bear witness, is to ensure that they did not die in vain. We must do everything that is humanly possible to reduce the number of grieving family members and loved ones without denying journalists their right to report freely on the world’s events. There will always be casualties in the chaos of war, but we can reduce the risks by making journalists better trained to face those risks.

Andrew Kain, writer on Security Issues

What do we ask of people like Terry Lloyd when we send them on a foreign assignment?

That they leave their friends, their family, their loved ones far behind. That they give up the luxuries – and even the basics of daily life – that all of us take for granted. That they spend months far from home, at times in the most miserable conditions. That they navigate hostile crowds, confront tyrants and those who abet them, master the complexities of foreign cultures, avoid crossfire and land mines, dead with friendly forces who are not uniformly friendly, conquer every logistical nightmare they encounter, go where the danger might be greatest.

What do they give us in return? They don’t receive medals or get given victory parades, they aren’t hailed as defenders of freedom. And yet they are defenders of freedom and guardians of truth.

For all the burdens they bear and the risks they face, they give in return the ingredients that sustain a free society. Their work – the reporter gathering information with determination and honesty, and empathy, the hard and often unpopular business of truth-telling - is not just a job, but a vital and virtuous enterprise.