Remembrance Day is meant to be quiet. A pause, a collective inhale, a moment to honour the fallen. But this year, as I sip my coffee in a cramped apartment overlooking a city skyline, it tastes bitter with the news of Gaza and Ukraine, and I cannot help but feel the irony: we commemorate journalists by recalling their sacrifices, yet every day, their sacrifices are renewed on our screens, in real time, in the relentless stream of human suffering.
International journalists, those who traverse frontlines, enter war zones, and insist on seeing the world as it is, not as governments wish it to appear, have always lived in a precarious balance. Remembrance Day, in its traditional form, recalls those who have already paid the ultimate price. Yet the wars in Gaza and Ukraine remind us that danger is not a relic; it is perennial. It is the war correspondent’s permanent companion, and for many, it is intimate, inescapable, and visceral.
In Gaza, the echoes of bombs do not merely rupture walls, they fracture the narrative itself. For journalists covering the conflict, every photograph, every interview, every written paragraph carries the weight of moral calculus. To report is to walk a tightrope between truth and propaganda, between bearing witness and becoming a target. The city is not only a warzone but a labyrinth of accountability, of human suffering that refuses to be sanitized. And yet, the journalists persist, risking detention, injury, even death. Remembrance Day should not merely memorialize the ones gone; it should acknowledge the living, those who navigate these mines of both ideology and explosives with pens and cameras as shields.
Ukraine offers a parallel, yet distinct, theater of the journalist’s peril. Here, war is expansive, almost bureaucratic in its violence. The missiles are precise, the lines of conflict drawn in icy fields and shattered cities. Journalists here face not just physical danger, but a political and informational one. To report is to be scrutinized, surveilled, and sometimes vilified for simply stating the visible truth. Remembrance Day, in the shadow of Ukraine, is a reminder that journalism’s greatest threats are not always grenades; sometimes, they are narratives weaponized against the storyteller.
Both theaters illuminate a painful truth, the world does not honour journalists adequately until they are gone. We celebrate them posthumously with solemnity, wreaths, and carefully crafted obituaries, but when alive, they often operate in precarity, unsupported and underappreciated. Remembrance Day should be less about ritualistic nostalgia and more about confronting this ongoing reality. If we are to truly honour journalists, we must examine the structures that leave them vulnerable, the governments that obstruct reporting, the corporations that value click rates over context, and the audiences that consume tragedy without reflection.
Yet, there is another layer to this day, a personal one, often overlooked in the rush of medals and ceremonies. Journalism, especially in conflict, is profoundly human. Each byline represents a mind and a heart grappling with questions no one else can answer: How much suffering should one witness before becoming numb? How does one maintain empathy when tragedy is routine? What does it mean to be impartial in the face of such obvious cruelty? The wars in Gaza and Ukraine are not abstract geopolitical chessboards; they are collections of broken homes, grieving families, and journalists who carry these stories like scars, invisible to the world.
I think of the journalists who go missing, those whose lives vanish behind barbed wire, behind missile smoke, behind the ever-shifting fog of battle. Remembrance Day often invokes heroes; but the reality is more nuanced. Heroism is sometimes mundane, a refusal to be silenced, a commitment to the story, a willingness to write when the world would rather not read. These are acts of quiet courage, performed daily, with no guarantee of recognition. And yet, these are the acts that keep the world tethered to truth.
The modern journalist inhabits a paradox: the more essential their work, the greater their vulnerability. In Gaza, in Ukraine, the press is not just an observer but a participant in moral witness. To see and report is itself an act of bearing responsibility. And in an era of social media outrage, where misinformation travels faster than ambulances, this responsibility is heavier than ever. Remembrance Day must acknowledge that journalism’s dangers are not confined to history; they are current, immediate, and urgent.
So what does it mean, in this era of continuous conflict, to honour journalists? It means more than a moment of silence. It means a recognition that the frontlines are not just distant cities; they are in every newsroom that dares to ask inconvenient questions, in every camera lens that captures the unsanitized truth, in every article that refuses to turn war into spectacle. It is a call to the public, too, to see journalists not as entertainment, not as ephemeral voices, but as chroniclers of our shared humanity, sometimes at the cost of their own lives.
Remembrance Day should remind us that truth is not safe. That the act of reporting war is not neutral. That journalists, living or deceased, deserve more than ceremonial recognition; they deserve protection, respect, and a world willing to bear witness alongside them. In the images of rubble, the cries of the displaced, and the silence of those who have vanished, we see what this day truly commemorates, not just the fallen, but the ongoing courage of those who refuse to look away.
Because in the end, journalism is an act of defiance, and Remembrance Day, if it is to mean anything at all, must honour that defiance. The bylines in blood are not past, they are present. And so long as Gaza burns, so long as Ukraine bleeds, we remember not only those who have died but those who continue, stubbornly, to tell the story.
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