Pig Iron: The many moral compromises of war reporting

Stephen Crane. Martha Gellhorn. Max Hastings. Many celebrated writers learned their craft and earned their credibility by reporting from the front lines of war. Then there are their fictional and semifictional counterparts: Thomas Fowler, from Graham Greene’s Quiet American, Welcome to Sarajevo’s Michael Henderson, the Richard Boyle we meet in Oliver Stone’s Salvador, and so on. They serve to underline the seductiveness of wartime reporting, for the audience, yes, but also for the reporters themselves: the heady promise of danger and drama as well as the allure of being the one who gets the story, exposes the war crimes and even effects change.

But how much can a “parachute journalist” ever know about the nuances of a region’s particular struggle? And where is the line between reporter and participant? These are among the questions raised in Basia Cummings’s fascinating Pig Iron, a new podcast from Tortoise Media. It’s an investigation into the death of Christopher Allen, who was killed in South Sudan on August 26th, 2017. He was embedded with South Sudanese rebel troops at the time, having gone to cover the civil war. He was 26 years old.

Cummings’s investigation begins when Allen’s cousin, Jeremy Bliss, contacts her, and together their inquiries take them to the east coast of the US to meet Allen’s parents, to Nairobi, to conversations with mercenaries, with Allen’s former girlfriend, with newspaper editors and war reporters, as well as through Allen’s own journals and notes from his frontline experiences.

Much of the success of Pig Iron is its nuanced and meticulous approach to a story with an ending at once clearly defined and shrouded in mystery. That Allen was shot to death in the South Sudanese town of Kaya is not disputed. But was he a journalist, targeted by a government that didn’t want the truth to get out? Or was he, as the government claimed, a “white mercenary” who had joined the fight?

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Her search for an answer also allows Cummings to examine the role the journalism industry has to play in stories like Allen’s: with shrinking budgets, it’s cheaper for news organisations to rely on freelancers for stories, even if they get no safety training, no editorial support and little remuneration for their work. Allen was one such freelancer, who started his career in Ukraine during the conflict that erupted in 2014, after becoming convinced that it was better to witness history up close as it unfolded than read about it in a book.

During his time in Ukraine, Allen was among the first journalists on the site of the Malaysian Airlines flight shot down by a Russian missile. He filed his story for the Telegraph. Then the other journalists arrived, and he watched with disgust as they rearranged the personal items of victims to get their shots. In another incident, he records in his own notes, he was offered a mortar to fire while covering an attack. At first demurring, he then took the weapon in his hands and fired. It’s a line crossed, and Cummings is clear about that, but in her conversations with war reporters, she hears how the rules of journalism get clouded on the front lines.

That’s what Pig Iron does best: shows how lines get blurred and sometimes erased, how even Cummings’s own impulses to help Allen’s parents must be admitted and interrogated, how difficult it is to ever claim objectivity or cling to cardinal rules of reporting.

“War is like pig iron on your moral compass,” says James Brabazon, a correspondent interviewed on the podcast. “It takes an extraordinary act of will to stay true.” But true to what? That’s the question Pig Iron seeks to answer.