The Platform: Dith Pran, One of Journalism's Heroes

Peter Osnos
The Century Foundation
3/18/2008

Dith Pran, who worked with New York Times correspondent Sidney Schanberg in Cambodia in the 1970s and became famous when their story won a Pulitzer Prize and was made into the movie The Killing Fields, is very ill with cancer. He was most recently in the Roosevelt Care Center in Edison, New Jersey. We can hope for a miraculous recovery. After all, Pran survived years of brutality under the Khmer Rouge and walked across the border into Thailand in 1979 where he was reunited with Schanberg. In 1980, Pran joined the New York Times as a photographer and later founded the Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness Project to educate young Americans about the horrors that followed the Indochina wars in Cambodia.

For his valor, talent, intelligence, and loyalty, Pran is a remarkable man and is honored as such. But Pran also symbolizes something broader for journalism, among our greatest and least recognized assets: the local reporters and assistants in zones of conflict and turmoil who translate the complexities on the ground for foreign correspondents.

When I was a regularly in Cambodia from 1970 to 1972 for the Washington Post and worked with Pran, we called these reporters “stringers” or interpreters. More recently, they have also been called “fixers” because of their role in managing the range of hassles and dangers in places such as Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, much of Africa, and wherever trouble attracts correspondents. I don’t much like the term “fixers” because of its vaguely negative connotation. But since reporters also tend to refer to themselves as “hacks”—a nod to Evelyn Waugh’s great satire, Scoop, about war correspondents a century ago in Africa—the term essentially reflects the casual irony of mordant self-deprecation that is a bond for journalists everywhere.

But war reporting is a very serious business. In Iraq, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, more than 125 journalists have been killed. Most of these were locals, and many were working with foreign correspondents for, among others, the New York Times and the Washington Post. Their role in collecting news, evaluating events, and managing the logistics of life in the midst of war has been indispensable—as it was in Cambodia when Pran was at our side. What he and his brethren provide to outsiders is a pipeline to stories without official filters. Their skills as fixers are valuable. Their dedication as journalists is what makes them heroic.

Pran was born in Siem Reap in 1942. He studied English, among other things, and was working in a hotel near the great ruins of Angkor Wat when the Vietnam War spilled over to Cambodia in 1970. The tourist trade disappeared and Pran made his way to the capital, Phnom Penh, where he teamed up with a driver named Mouv and began offering services to visiting correspondents at the Hotel Royale, the ramshackle colonial-era hotel where most of us lived. By the time I arrived in Cambodia in late 1970, my colleague, Peter A. Jay, had arranged for Pran and Mouv to be on hand whenever we were in the country, beginning at Phnom Penh’s Pochentong International Airport, where they expertly navigated the often capriciously managed arrival formalities.

In that period of the war, coverage consisted largely of driving in Mouv’s weathered white Mercedes (another refugee from the tourist trade) to battlefronts down the various highways splayed around Phnom Penh. Pran saw us through the countless roadblocks and other military obstacles and carried out the interviews that were the basis for our stories. In the early days of the war, dozens of reporters, including a number of foreigners were killed, because they underestimated how dangerous the countryside was as they careened around in their cars. Knowing where to go—and when to turn back—was an essential piece of the reporter’s job, and without Pran and Mouv to handle those judgments, we were largely immobilized.

William Shawcross wrote a classic account of the Cambodia conflict called Sideshow, which defined the way the United States approached the war there, in contrast to the one in Vietnam, where the vast American military apparatus was based. As the U.S. military gradually withdrew from Indochina and interest in the war faded, Schanberg moved to Phnom Penh because he recognized that what was happening there was an unfolding catastrophe, whether or not Americans cared. He hired Pran full time, and together they brilliantly covered the deterioration of Lon Nol’s corrupt government and the gathering power of the Khmer Rouge, culminating in 1975 in the communist victory, and the mayhem that followed.

Pran’s choice to stay in Phnom Penh and at Schanberg’s side when the Khmer Rouge took over is now a piece of history. Schanberg was soon expelled and Pran was sent to labor camps where he somehow endured the tortures that took the lives of as many as two million Cambodians, including many in his family, and his partner, Mouv. Pran’s was an act of great personal courage and friendship. But Pran’s life and work were also a symbol of reporting at its best. Once settled in this country, Pran became a photographer of considerable skill for the New York Times, and his advocacy on behalf of Cambodia in many ways was important also.

In the Indochina war years and since, Dith Pran, and the legion of stringers, assistants, interpreters, and fixers everywhere he represents, have served journalism’s highest calling.

They make getting the stories possible, and for that our gratitude should be boundless.