When Sally Hayden was named Ireland’s Journalist of the Year last month for the second time in three years, it was an acknowledgment of how her reporting for The Irish Times combines dogged investigative work, close attention to the experience of people caught up in war and geopolitical conflict, and a precise, almost austere style that refuses the consolations of sentimentality. Her journalism asks you to look directly at what is happening to people who have very little power, in places where the most powerful actors would prefer you looked away.
But Hayden also forms a part of what has become a distinctive tradition of women reporting international conflict. Lara Marlowe’s work for The Irish Times across the Middle East, the Balkans and, more recently, Ukraine has set – and continues to set – a benchmark. More recently, Hannah McCarthy’s reporting for a number of Irish outlets continues that tradition.
Across the world, the fact that women are now so prominent in covering war, migration and political breakdown is a relatively recent development. A domain dominated by male militarism and masculine violence was long deemed out of bounds for female reporters. One of the key drivers of change has been the BBC which, beginning in the 1980s, slowly and often reluctantly began to change its employment practices around foreign reporting.
That story is the subject of a recently published book by Colleen Murrell, called BBC Women Reporting the World: Conversations with Foreign Correspondents.
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Murrell now teaches in Dublin City University’s School of Communications, but before that she worked in foreign newsgathering for the BBC, ITN, Associated Press and several Australian broadcasters. She is, therefore, both an academic and a practitioner; a combination that can produce books which are either heavy with theory or padded with anecdotes. This one succeeds because it is neither.
The introductory chapter offers a guided tour of the institutional habits that shaped, and often constrained, the careers of women in international reporting. The BBC is an ideal case study for this: large enough to matter and institutionally honest enough to keep on record what senior managers really thought about women’s voices on air.
The corporation’s first staff women foreign correspondents were only appointed in the mid-1980s. The posts were treated as a kind of experiment. Murrell shows how, by that stage, organisations like the BBC had already accumulated decades of unwritten assumptions about who could be trusted with war reporting, who could negotiate with armed groups or could disappear for months without causing domestic inconvenience.
Early pioneers such as Kate Adie and Diana Goodman demonstrated that these assumptions were flimsy. But the preconceptions persisted in subtler forms long after the official barriers were dismantled.
To understand the careers that followed, Murrell argues, you have to look at more than individual talent or determination, important though those are. The book’s long interviews with Adie, Goodman, Lyse Doucet, Orla Guerin and others reveal a constant interplay between opportunity and constraint.
There’s the job offer that arrives only because a senior man retires unexpectedly; the decision to accept a dangerous posting partly to prove the offer was not a token gesture; the quiet, relentless calculus about when to push back and when to stay silent because “difficult” is a label that sticks faster to women than to men.
Doucet’s story exemplifies some of this. Starting from a small Acadian community in New Brunswick, Canada, she would once have been eliminated on accent alone, long before anyone got around to reading her copy. Instead, she built a career that turned those early disadvantages into strengths: a facility with languages, ease in post-conflict societies and an almost missionary commitment to being physically present when things are at their worst.
At one point, she describes spreading out a map and looking for the place where the BBC had no correspondent; that is how she ended up, in the early 1990s, travelling in Afghanistan disguised in male clothing in order to reach mujahideen commanders.
Guerin is one of those figures who seems to have been on television forever, but Murrell reminds us that she began in the rather different world of RTÉ current affairs before moving to the BBC. From there, she has covered conflicts on every continent. If you have ever turned on the BBC news and heard that distinctive, slightly weary cadence from a war zone, you will know the effect.
Guerin speaks at length about early-career scepticism: editors who liked the idea of putting a woman on screen but worried, quietly, about whether viewers would trust her; competitors who assumed she was getting breaks for symbolic reasons; the constant scrutiny of her tone when reporting on Israel and Palestine.
Yet she also stresses the opportunities that did exist. In regions where foreign media were thin on the ground, a reporter willing to stay on after the initial burst of interest could build up expertise and contacts quickly. Guerin talks about Sarajevo as a place where under-resourced news organisations relied on one another for practical help: “I just stayed when other people left.”
Audiences, Guerin argues, are the ultimate judges of authority, not editors. Murrell positions this as a kind of counterweight to the institutional structures that kept women away from foreign postings. An organisation might be ambivalent about appointing a woman to a high-profile job, but it becomes much harder to move her aside when the audience has decided she’s the one they trust to tell them what’s happening in Beirut or Kharkiv.
Murrell’s book suggests that the old assumptions about who is suitable for the front line have not vanished; they have learned to speak the more fluent language of diversity strategies and risk assessments. But the careers she documents show what happens when those assumptions are challenged, quite often, at considerable personal cost. The reporting gets better. And our understanding of the world, and our place in it, expands accordingly.
BBC Women Reporting the World: Conversations with Foreign Correspondents is published by Palgrave Macmillan
