There is no substitute for ‘on the ground’ reporting, even if the pandemic has made it more difficult

Reporting on international affairs suffers without correspondents on the ground, writes Borzou Daragahi

A poster of former Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. He held the office from 1987 but was forced to step down and flee the country after the revolution in 2011 (Getty)

I first got my taste of remote reporting in Iraq. As the country became mired in a violent civil conflict, with sectarian violence erupting in 2006, it became too dangerous for correspondents and their local colleagues to visit some of the war-ravaged cities or blood-soaked rural valleys. Journalists learned to make do by cobbling together reports from phone interviews and reports filed by trusted local correspondents, who themselves sometimes were forced to rely on networks of contacts rather than on-the-ground accounts.  

Later, those tools would come to help correspondents who were on the ground, supplementing, for example, reporting from one side of a battlefield with phone interviews and video footage from another.  

Over the last decade, as emboldened authoritarian regimes began tightening visa and accreditation rules, the tools of reporting remotely became one way to circumvent censorship attempts by regimes seeking to criminalise journalism.