From The Atlantic: http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/02/its-more-dangerous-than-ever-to-be-a-female-war-reporter/273322/
“Women are targets”: an interview with former foreign reporter Anne Sebba, author of a book on women journalists
Emily Chertoff
Feb 21 2013
It’s tempting to think women can do everything men can. And then you hear about Lara Logan, who was sexually assaulted in Egypt during a protest, after Mubarak had been deposed and while she was with her camera crew. Logan told a press conference last month that she now keeps a journal for her two young children “so that if something happens to her they’ll know why she does what she does.”
Anne Sebba, a biographer and former Reuters correspondent in Rome, notes that in many ways, things are easier today for a woman reporter than they were in what she calls “the days of the still-idolized Martha Gellhorn, who had to dress up as a hospital orderly in order to report the D-Day landings in competition with her husband Ernest Hemingway.” The new edition of Battling for News, Sebba’s 1994 history of women reporters, is a story of women’s competence in the field overcoming sexism against them.
But while she acknowledges that a lot has changed for the better, Sebba has given the new introduction to Battling for News a downbeat spin. (The book will be re-released in the UK in April.) While inherent bias in journalism has eased, changes in media technology and combat tactics have put women reporters in physical peril.
I spoke with Sebba in Washington, D.C. while she was in the U.S. promoting her latest book, a biography of Wallis Simpson.
Continue reading at: http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/02/its-more-dangerous-than-ever-to-be-a-female-war-reporter/273322/
