Leave your feedback Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/perils-of-reporting-in-war-zone-examined Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Transcript Jeffrey Brown and guests discuss the dangers of reporting from a war zone following the rescue of a New York Times reporter. Read the Full Transcript Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors. JIM LEHRER: And to Jeffrey Brown. JEFFREY BROWN: And we pick up on some of the issues raised by all this now with Rajiv Chandrasekaran of the Washington Post. He just returned from Afghanistan yesterday.And Bing West, a Marine combat veteran of Vietnam and assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration, he's author of several military histories, most recently "The Strongest Tribe," a history of the Iraq war.Rajiv, you were just in this area looking at the same story, an important story, a dangerous story. So how do you weigh the balance, the risks? RAJIV CHANDRASEKARAN: Well, it's a balancing act that every journalist who operates in places like Afghanistan and in Iraq has to engage in, in almost a daily basis.When I was out there last week and we first got word of this, I weighed the risks of going up there, first, the drive from Kabul, then, of course, the trip to the scene, and concluded initially that this was going to be a little too dangerous for me. I chose not to do that.I, fortunately, was able to get a ride out to the northern city of Kunduz with NATO forces and then spent some time at a German base right there not more than about four miles from the scene and was able to, in the course of about 36 hours, go and talk to witnesses and survivors at a hospital, go and talk to the German forces who actually ordered the strike, to local officials.And so what I tried to do there was to find multiple ways to get at some of this information, because it was very clear to me when I was out there that the local officials were saying, "This is way too dangerous. It is an area that we don't feel comfortable going." And even the German forces, troops with armored vehicles, machine guns, didn't feel comfortable going into that area in the aftermath of the bombing. JEFFREY BROWN: Well, Bing West, there are a lot of facts here that we still don't know about. But when you have this kind of tension between the media and the military, from the military perspective, are there rules of engagement when the decision has to be made of a rescue attempt like this, when they're put in a tough position like this?