Former MSNBC and CNN war correspondent and blogger Kevin Sites found himself on the other side of the headlines last fall, when he videotaped a U.S. Marine shooting and killing an injured, unarmed Iraqi insurgent in a Fallujah mosque. That wasn’t the first time Sites had been at the pounding heart of the action; earlier in the war Iraqi fedayeen soldiers ambushed his Tikrit-bound car and held Sites captive at gunpoint for one terrifying day. For most people that would have been more than enough reason to pack up the laptop and go home. Instead, later this month the 42-year-old Sites is embarking on a yearlong mission to report on the most dangerous ongoing conflicts in the world, in such places as Somalia, Sierra Leone, Iraq, Afghanistan, Indonesia, Chechnya, and Colombia, as Yahoo News’s first correspondent. For the daily series–called "Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone"–the heat-seeking journalist is flying solo to videotape, report, and blog about what he considers the untold stories of each region. Radar Online recently met with Sites to find out just how big his balls are. Uh, so to speak.
Radar Online: So, how did the Yahoo deal happen?
Kevin Sites: The whole thing came about initially when I came back from Iraq the last time, and following the tsunami. Obviously I had kind of a controversial year, with the mosque shooting, and I felt in some ways that the mainstream media, which I’d been working for, wasn’t able to get the whole story out. There were lapses, and I had been more effective on my blog. The letter I wrote following the mosque shooting got larger play and illustrated the story so much better than the television story we had done. A family friend who is also an entertainment lawyer in a Los Angeles said to me, "Did you ever think about anything outside of the networks?" He said, "What would you think about working for Yahoo?"
Are you personally more likely to look for news on blogs or in the mainstream media?
You know, I want it all to wash over me to some extent. I certainly pay attention to the mainstream media, but, like most people these days who are under 70, I don’t have time to sit down and watch the nightly news. And I used to work for them. So most of my news searching comes from the internet. I will look at blogs, I’ll look at irregular sources, but also at a lot of the mainstream sites.
Irregular sources?
I love Boing Boing. They were really integral in me starting my blog. I didn’t know what a blog was when I started this thing. I had been sending dispatches back for a New Times newspaper–a little bit during Kosovo, but not a whole lot. I reported some stuff for MSNBC but then started doing a lot in Afghanistan. And then I would also e-mail all my friends, and it got to some friends that were connected to the blog world and they said, "Why don’t you blog?" And I said, "Great! What’s a blog?"
Your blog’s tagline has been "dispatches from a life in conflict." What compels you to want to spend a life in conflict?
I’m not trained to do anything else. [Laughs] I don’t have any other skills at this point.
Having brass balls is your only skill?
Well, thank you, but they do clang every so often, believe me. I’ve been scared a lot. The conflict thing happened by accident. I was a producer for NBC and doing law and order stories. We did two law and order stories, and then automatically they sent us over to the Middle East to cover the no-fly zone, so we got into conflict coverage right away. I kind of fell in love with it. We had done stories that had just bored me to tears back in the States. I’m not saying that domestic stories are boring, but what we were covering at the time didn’t seem to have the impact, and there was such inherent drama in this that the reporting was almost easy. There’s this happening; it has global consequences, so people want to pay attention. When you’re shooting footage of jets taking off from an aircraft carrier, there’s inherent drama in that. It’s kind of easy to write into a story. And then I ended up in Kosovo, covering that. I got very affected by the human side of war, the ravages going on there, refugees, the exodus from Serbian atrocities that were happening, houses being burned, that kind of thing. It impacted me in a great way, and I started doing web stories for MSNBC. Then in Afghanistan I ended up in combat without a correspondent. Just one of those things that happened. And they asked me to report. I had one on-air reporting job before this. I looked different from other correspondents, and my stuff was really rough–but they liked it.
You hear about war correspondents who get into the rush of it and even become addicted to the experience. Are you addicted to it now?
I have to say that Let’s see, how to put this? I don’t like to see misery, and war certainly manufactures misery like nothing else. After the tsunami I saw dozens and dozens and dozens of bodies, more than I saw in the fighting in Iraq. But the fighting and killing in Iraq bothered me more, because it was humans killing humans, rather than nature. To some extent you become overstimulated. The things you see are so inherently dramatic that you’re overstimulated to such a great degree that coming back to this life, everything spikes downward. So that overstimulation does carry a cost, really.
When were you most scared? The day you were held captive in Iraq?
That was the most afraid I’ve been, without a doubt. I mean, coming under fire from someone, despite the fact that you are under fire, you feel that you have some control–duck, move, whatever. And you build up your résumé of experiences with weaponry. In the sense that, "Okay, I’ve been mortared. I kind of know how they hit, where they go. I kind of know how that works." We had armed security with us that day, but it was a situation that we blundered into. We had been really careful about it, but we were competing with other correspondents to get to Tikrit first, and we thought we had gone into a peshmerga checkpoint, but it was a fedayeen checkpoint and it all went down from there. And it was really frightening because we didn’t know what was going to happen, and it happened so fast it was disconcerting. I’m in a car and driving–yes, I’m in a war zone, but I kind of know about traveling around. It was a beautiful day. The war was still going on, so there wasn’t an insurgency created yet. It went from being in a fairly safe place, driving in the car, to being on the ground with a gun in the back of my head and I had already had a shot fired between my legs. I couldn’t process it mentally. It got beyond the scope of me; I was like, "This can’t be happening." It’s almost like when you’re little and you fall out of a tree, and you’re going, "I’m falling out of this tree. This can’t be happening. Then you hit the ground." I couldn’t believe it was happening to me. I remember being face down on the ground with my security guy next to me saying, "Mitch, what do we do now?" And my mouth was so dry. You keep thinking of all the things that happen to you, and death, that was certainly in the forefront, but I was even more afraid of being taken to Tikrit and being tortured. And you hear all these things, and they have nothing to lose at this point. So that was disconcerting.
Was that the most dangerous place you’ve been?
I have to say I’ve been in more dangerous positions physically; I was shot at a lot in Fallujah. And in Afghanistan, too, I had mortar drop right next to me. It flagged a producer standing right next to me, but I was fine. In Fallujah people were getting picked off around me. I had three RPGs fired in my direction; one skittled at my feet and didn’t explode, one hit a wall behind me, and one was fired right into the lip of the wall where I was shooting. So that was probably the most dangerous place.
Are you religious? Do you feel as if a higher power was looking out for you?
I wouldn’t say that. I was raised Catholic, and I’m a very fallen Catholic. I certainly believe in spirituality. There seems to be interconnectivity between everything.
You mentioned Fallujah. I’m wondering how the mosque shooting you witnessed has changed your life?
That was, next to the capture, probably the most difficult moment of my life. When I captured that incident on videotape I felt kind of the way Eddie Adams felt after he captured the photograph of the South Vietnamese colonel executing a Vietcong suspect. Eddie said, "The colonel killed the Vietcong with his gun; I killed the colonel with my camera." All three of their lives were changed forever. I felt the same thing happen with myself, that marine, and that Iraqi insurgent: Our lives were changed forever at that point.
Subsequently the marine was cleared of charges.
He wasn’t cleared; the military decided not to charge him. They did not pursue any charges. They called it a good killing for the most part.
How do you feel about that?
It’s not my job to judge whether what he did was right or was wrong. It’s my job to show the realities of war, and that’s part of the realities. We ask people to do things on our behalf, and we have to accept that, both good and bad. I’ll tell you this, it wasn’t completely consistent with all the things that are expected of that situation. And part of the reason that people didn’t understand that is they never showed the whole video. It wasn’t a tactical decision. At that moment I had two insurgents in front of me still breathing, and there was another one under a blanket. It was tactical if you take them all out or you search for weapons. But these guys had been shot once the day before in a legitimate firefight. They were unarmed on that day. They came back in, this same guy shot them all again, then we waited and he shot them a third time. Sorry, but it wasn’t tactical.
How has the experience affected your relationship with the military?
I, surprisingly, have a very good relationship with the military, because I think, for the most part, they understand that we initially did a poor job of educating the military on the role of journalists in a free society, and a poor job of educating the public. Our job is to seek and report the truth. That’s our code of ethics. In addition to that, it’s also to be empathetic to our sources, walk around in their shoes. Be accountable and responsible and independent. Who are we going to rely on to give us accurate information? The government? The military? No, you have to have a free press for a real democracy to function. But I’ve said this before, and I think the military understands this: Despite the initial negativity of that piece of video, and it’s a hard thing to take, it shows a country willing to stop in the middle of a shooting fight and investigate. And I also walked out of there with that videotape. I was not shot; the tape was not confiscated. I can’t think of another country whose military would have let me do that. So in some senses I give them all kinds of credit. It was not my intent to see this man put in jail, or whatever. This is what we ask people to do in war, so we need to accept it. But then we accept the consequences of looking like a nation that’s not exactly benign in that case. And I think we look as if we wanted to pursue justice with this. For the most part.
Were you ever threatened over the incident?
Never. And I never got a bad word or an angry e-mail from any of the guys I served with, and I’ve been invited to speak at military conferences. I was invited to West Point. I’ve sat with two-star and one-star generals and showed them the whole video and never once got an angry word. The anger came from right-wing extremist bloggers and people who took portions of what they saw or didn’t see all of it.
You’ve talked about the five fingers of journalism: video, audio, still images, text, and the internet’s interactivity. Have you ever wanted to use those five fingers to bitch-slap anyone?
Oh, absolutely. Here you have the power of the media, and you think, especially in an emotional state, what you could do with it. If someone treats you poorly, if they aren’t doing their job correctly, you’d certainly like to use that with a sense of vengeance, but it’s not right and of course you have to hold back. I don’t want to become that person. Honestly, I’ve been the victim of emotional responses to reporting, and it’s not a pleasant place to be. When you get e-mails that say, "The next piece if video I want to see in Iraq is your severed head on your body." I’d like to hold back on that a little. I want there to be emotion in my writing, but sensory emotion rather than emotion based on a superficial reaction to things. Newsmakers are fair game to some extent, but again, not necessarily for emotional impact. If people know I’m angry off the bat, the ones who agree with me read on and the ones who don’t turn me off. So that defeats my purpose. I have responded to people who have written me hate mail–but I’ve responded emotionally in one-on-one situations, not using the public forum. I’ve responded in two ways. If they were so angry that they threaten my family, then I’ve gone after them: "Motherfucker, don’t even think about it." The other reaction is "I’m angry. I understand some aspects of what you did." Then I try to explain. I’ll say, "If you take the personal invective out of your e-mail, I’ll respond to you. I’ll tell you what you want to know, unless you call me an asshole." In most cases, when I have responded they’ve been overwhelmed. They’ve written me back and said, "Oh my god, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I called you an asshole."
What do you do after this year, for an encore?
Once you get through all the conflicts, you should consider yourself lucky. If you get through with all your limbs and everything.
