Moths to Flames
The seduction, and the darkness, of war reporting
“She definitely wanted to be where people were doing something wrong, where she had a purpose. CNN was just a different drug.”
That description of Margaret Moth, videographer and CNN cameraperson, by one of her former lovers Jeff Russi, could describe any number of journalists past and present who cover war and devastation.
But even among those drawn to covering conflict, Moth was extreme.
I recently watched “Never Look Away,” the Lucy Lawless-directed documentary about her fellow New Zealander Moth. I knew little about Moth prior to watching the film. She largely predated my time in war zones. In 2009, cancer finally took the life that a sniper’s bullet in Sarajevo in 1992 could not. We never crossed paths.
Moth was almost a caricature. I met some larger-than-life people in war zones, but no one as “big” as Moth. According to the film and testimonials from friends, family, colleagues, and lovers, there wasn’t enough sex, drugs, and rock and roll to satisfy her. An avid skydiver, that rush wasn’t enough.
In 1990, she joined CNN, and soon after she deployed to the Arabian Gulf.
Russi said Moth found her high shooting for CNN during Desert Storm. “That’s where she felt the most comfortable,” he said. “I think that's where she knew she was who she was. At a certain point drugs and rock and roll just wasn't enough. War was the ultimate drug. Desert Storm was where she made it. Her dream had come true.”
That resonated deeply with me, although in a slightly different way. While I never had Moth’s hedonistic appetite, I related to the notion of finding your place in the world.
“I wasn’t who I was because I was a journalist, I was a journalist because of who I am,” I wrote in my book, “Passport Stamps,” in 2023. Considering the subtitle is “Searching the World for a War to Call Home,” I definitely understand much of what drew Moth to that flame, and why she returned to action after recovering from being shot in Sniper Alley in Sarajevo.
Despite severe facial injuries and having difficulty eating and talking after the shooting that nearly killed her, she returned to the Balkans and filmed conflicts in Rwanda, Zaire, Iraq, Israel, Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories.
Her footage, seen throughout the documentary (along with a lot of footage by other CNN shooters), was some of the most vivid and gruesome of those conflicts. As much as I was chasing that kind of action when I first went into conflict reporting, I’m glad I ended up experiencing very little of it.
During my time in hostile environments, I found photographers and videographers to be the biggest risk takers. They would run closer to the action than I had any desire to. The late NPR photographer David Gilkey used to refer to his feet as his telephoto lens.
Still, Moth was on a different level.
Former CNN correspondent Stef Kotsonis related this anecdote in the film that gives a sense of Moth in the field. At one point during the civil war in Georgia in 1991, gunmen for the militia trying to take over the former Soviet republic opened fire on a crowd. (Quick disclosure, Kotsonis and I worked together at WBUR in the early 2000s, and he tipped me off about the documentary in 2023 when it was in production.)
When the firing started, the other cameraman stuck behind the cars, and they're trying to wait to see what shots they can get. And one cameraman later on back at the hotel said to me “I'm hiding behind the car to get out of the gunfire, and I suddenly see a shadow across my arms, and I think ‘what the hell?’ I look up and there's Margaret standing straight upright, not hiding behind the vehicles filming the action.”
That's the only pictures. She's filming people going down as they get hit. The other camera people were kind of startled that she had the guts to just say “uh uh” and step right out in the middle of it.
Based on the descriptions in the film of her childhood and life to that point, it’s clear Moth had a mix of demons and a lust for danger and adrenaline that could only be satisfied by being as close to death and destruction as possible.
Kotsonis said: “I never fully understood what was ticking inside of her, but I always felt that my god, you know, there's a deep anger in there somewhere. I mean, you could sense that's behind all of that. It came from a place of anger and defiance.”
But there was clearly more to it, a need to show people the horrors in the world.
Kotsonis:
As a journalist, I had this romantic notion that we're supposed to make this a better place. We're supposed to bring up the good in every person and all that. She was more cynical, and I think for her the photographs, the images, the video she captured was shoved in your face—here it is, and she had no more trouble with it than that. It was like “Here it is. Take it. This is your shit.”
Those comments also struck me because they hit on things I wrestled with as a journalist and still think about. I mused about the range of personalities and motivations in what’s referred to as “vulture journalism,” which encompasses war reporting and other reporting on human suffering that involves descending on those in the aftermath of trauma and capturing their stories and pain.
I wrote in my book:
Within the field of vulture journalism there is a spectrum. There are those like Dick Thornburg in Die Hard who are sociopathic, narcissistic, predatory reporters who want pain and suffering to capture audiences, win awards, and advance their careers. They don’t give a shit about the distressed people in front of them. Some of them will cross lines like staging photographs, coaching interviewees, or inventing details and conversations. They will further traumatize interviewees by pushing their buttons to get more vivid material. From my experience, those personalities are most common among TV journalists because of the nature of the medium. That said, I have known plenty of radio and print reporters who made my skin crawl.
At the other end of the spectrum are bleeding heart journalists who want to save every life they encounter. They are often crusaders and advocates who sometimes lose objectivity and should probably be working for aid groups or the UN.
I skewed a little off-center toward the sociopathic end of the spectrum, although I was hardly a Thornburg. I am not a Type-A personality, more of a Type-B+, like most of my grades in high school (we won’t discuss my college grades). I had empathy and gained more the longer I did the job. I felt an obligation to the people I reported on to inform the world about their plight. Raising awareness was how I could help them.
Several interviewees in the documentary talked about Moth’s drive to raise awareness through her footage.
Russi said: “Margaret had a very intense morality about her because what she shot went out to the world and affected hundreds of thousands of people.”
Former CNN CEO Tom Johnson said: “She wanted to show the world at times the brutality of war, particularly the impact on the innocents, the impact on the children.”
“Tough is what she did. Tough was not how she acted,” Kotsonis said. “She would tell you in so many different ways that she didn't care about people, you know, people are screwed, humanity’s a mess. But when it came down to it, she was relating to those kids. You could see she appreciated humanity.”
As the film went on, I found myself increasingly relating to Kotsonis as he described his ambivalence and internal conflicts about war journalism and how different Moth was.
Kotsonis talked about working with Moth in Iraq in the early ‘90s.
I was a few years into being a correspondent and part of me wanted out. I was sick of it. I was kind of heartbroken with the cruelty and heartbroken with innocent people going through awful, awful stuff. But Margaret didn't seem to feel the same way. For better or for worse, war is an amazing feeling, mind blowing. You've never experienced anything like this. It's an emotional, psychological, sensory explosion. Nothing compares.
Margaret got a little bit excited by it. Any such experiences or emotions, Margaret drank up. She just drank ‘em up. She was fearless, but she was always cool headed. She had a sense of not just a pretty pictures but of sort of the reality here, the messy human reality of war, and she would get that in the shot. She was calm, collected, but she was on. She was recording history.
I went into war journalism thinking I was going to be like Moth—fearless, in the center of the action, moving from one conflict to another. Instead, I found myself much more like Kotsonis—disillusioned and troubled by what we covered and experienced.
He said:
Depending on your personality make up, you may want to brag about war … it's intoxicating. If you're like me, you don't want to glorify it cause it's just awful. It is awful, but that said, your experience of it is an incredibly complex concoction of adrenaline and this and that and upset, and so you could be upset and excited at the same time. So, while I hate to glorify it, also it was kind of a rush. War is a tough job, and we self-medicated. This is life and death.
Indeed.
Coming home, though, can be even more difficult. As Russi said, Moth was never the same after her first assignment in a war zone. As so many veterans and journalists experience, it can be incredibly difficult to relate to the “real world” or “normal world” after you have spent time in a war zone.
Many people find their way back, many don’t. Some simply can’t leave that world.
I have seen it in some journalists. They fear missing the next big story. Others fear—often unconsciously—slowing down enough that all the sights, sounds, smells and the experiences and emotions will wash over them. They need to stay in the action and keep moving to stay one step ahead of the pain and trauma.
While I have no desire to do front-line, or “bang-bang,” reporting anymore, I can’t help but want to be in Ukraine, Sudan, Syria, and such places telling the stories of those living through conflict or the aftermath. Those stories and voices need to be heard.
As the chapter of my book “Aftermath” describes, I am not the same person I was before I went into conflict journalism, and I have not felt “at home” or that any of the work I’ve done since has been as satisfying or meaningful. Had NPR not closed the Kabul bureau at the end of 2014, I would have stayed in that world and continued that work.
And had Moth not died from colon cancer, I have no doubt she would have stayed in the action because there was nowhere else in the world she felt at home or at peace. The odds probably would have caught up with her the way they did for so many like Gilkey, Marie Colvin, Anja Niedringhaus, Tim Hetherington, Chris Hondros, and others who kept going until they didn't make it back.
Ultimately, I give Lawless credit for showing Moth in all her complexity and not glorifying any of it. There is no judgement in the film. She was an extreme, damaged person who did incredible and incredibly important work, and unlike so many TV correspondents, she didn’t make herself the story.
“Never Look Away” is not an easy film to watch as it’s wall to wall death and destruction. But we would not see and have the opportunity to try to comprehend war without Moth’s footage and the footage and reporting of others like her.
Perhaps the most difficult part of watching the film is reconciling how leaders around the world continue to be so quick to resort to violence and war given the death and devastation it causes as captured by the likes of Moth.