“Journalism was not a child's dream”, says Wilson Fache, now an independent journalist from Brussels, “It’s only once I started that I thought: this is exactly what I want”. Since 2015, Fache has been reporting from the distress and societal fracture the conflict has infused across the Middle East and Ukraine.
“It was the time of the Arab Spring” he recalls as I ask about the debut of his career, “revolutions turning into civil wars and counter-revolutions. That is what was happening as I was learning how to be a journalist, so of course that context influenced me.” Wilson began as a foreign correspondent in Iraq, where he covered the war against ISIS for three years before going to the West Bank, in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. “And since then, I have been back and forth to Afghanistan, Ukraine, Iraq, Israel, Palestine, and Syria.”
For now, Fache is based in Brussels, where I have the pleasure to meet him for a chat. He usually leaves the Belgian capital for month-long missions turned into multiple formats, “a bit of radio, a bit of TV sometimes, for Belgian, French and other international outlets”.
“How is your Arabic?” I dare to ask. “I can manage” he admits, particularly in Palestine where he learned the vernacular of Levantine Arabic. His role in conflict areas came later on, when he sensed both his experience in the region and war zones were sufficient to report on conflict. “I thought: ‘Okay, now I have the skills. I know how to navigate hostile environments, when I am at the checkpoints, for instance, how to act with soldiers, how to interact with victims of war, or resort to first-aid skills". And this was a reason to become a war correspondent, not only in the Middle East but also Ukraine when the war began.
As the conversation proceeds, Wilson draws an imagery of war which goes beyond a perhaps limited understanding of it as a reality of brutality and violence. “The ramifications are infinite” he reveals when I ask about his aim as a war reporter: “Documenting the societal impacts of war and the intrafamiliar relations. Not war just seen as violence and people shooting”. Through feature stories and long-format reporting, Wilson dives into the societal chambers of war to give an angle which has not been given before, “even when reporting on conflicts which have been on the news for decades”, he says.
“What does it mean when Russian-speaking Ukrainians decide to switch languages, to switch their native tongue; what does it mean when they remove Russian books from Vernadsky National Library; what does it mean when survivors of the October 7 attacks in Israel, who were pro-peace activists, say they do not believe in a two-state solution anymore. These are the angles I am interested in.”
War, however, is not a straight timeline of brutality with a clear start and end-day. “There is often a lot of interest in war but very little interest in what comes after war, which is not necessarily peace.” Post-conflict contexts are transitional periods between war and peace, arenas where an interplay of actors and challenges come into being, often failing to secure relief and post-war reconstruction.
“It is not as easy. There is less interest from the public, from newsrooms, maybe from ourselves”. He recognises that creating stories from post-conflict zones is not as easy as those thriving from war. "In a warzone anywhere there is something happening, something visual, something that can be easily used for your story."
But war reporting has become more complex than having news organizations sending foreign correspondents to regions in conflict. There are a few reasons for this, leading to a widespread phenomenonconsequence known as civilian journalism. News organizations are increasingly reluctant to be responsible for war reporters, including freelancers, in danger-led war zones, discouraging further engagement in an already complicated profession.
Support lacks, but access to war zones does as well. Think of Gaza: . “What we see with the war at the moment, which is a great example since there are no foreign journalists allowed. Only local journalists” he says. So if there are no journalists, and Western media is growingly distrusted by many, where is real-time war coverage coming from?
Wilson looks back to the war in Aleppo, where civilian journalism became an early example of citizens directly providing the world with images of one of the bloodiest battles of Syria’s civil war. “Then we relied on this digital first-hand account, coming from people on the ground, civilians. Now we see it on a scale we have never seen before amidst the war in Gaza”. Civilian journalism acts outside established media structures, opening avenues for accountability of media outlets in case of inaccuracies or insufficient coverage. It liberalizes the dissemination of information, allowing civilian journalists to participate in the process of news creation through their own personal experience.
“Should conventional forms of journalism adapt to this new reality?” I anticipated. Wilson emphasized the fact that they are just two different things which can coexist. “Sometimes they feed one another, and often conventional journalism uses these testimonies to identify individuals, reach out to people who are on the ground and access evidence”.
However, he admits, “sometimes the more content, the more noise, the more fatigue and the more overwhelming quantity of contradictory information”. The problem seems to be the sense of urgency behind civilian journalism. “You have your phone, you film and you share it immediately instead of waiting to understand what actually happened. And, you know, I don’t think there is malicious intent behind these mistakes especially in the context of war reporting as someone who is under direct bombing”. He then draws a comparison with a journalist working from their office in Paris or New York, who nevertheless “needs that reporting from that citizen journalist on the ground to collect evidence and recreate the events and conclude what happened.”
The problem is that impatience is a pacesetter. Contradiction between first-hand evidence from civilians and investigations conducted by professional journalists afterwards is often inevitable. But what is the proportion of readers willing to debunk contradictions between claims? “Most of the time it is a minority that takes the time to look into it and find truthful conclusions" he admits.
“So how should the public navigate such chaos of information?” I ask, aiming to find some hope within the mist. “I would say people should be critical and patient when a huge claim is made, to understand that journalism does not happen in a day and that investigation takes time”. Critical, patient and… trustful? How to be certain that the reporting one consumes on social media or newsroom platforms can be trusted is a problem. But it can also be a solution.
Trust is a precious and volatile reality often taken for granted. After October 7, 2023, trust on Western media has fallen from the ladder and has become for some a deal with the devil at a high moral cost. The reality is, however, that large Western media outlets, he cites The New York Times or Le Monde, for example, “are the ones conducting in-depth investigations, they are the ones with the budget and the skills to actually understand what happens throughout the developments of a war. That doesn’t mean that you need to trust them blindly”.
On a hopeful note, the pursuit of trust amidst an ocean of news is not a lost one. “A great part of the public has distrust towards many newsrooms but they do trust reporters on the ground” he shares. “People would say: I don’t like Western media or that specific newspaper, but I trust you, because you were there and you saw everything you wrote or reported about. Maybe we, as journalists, should invest more in that and work more for direct reporting on news instead of merely commenting on news. This can be a start to build trust among the readership, through trusting reporters.”
Personalizing stories through long-format content is key to help those increasingly distrustful towards conventional news make sense of the devastating impacts of the war. Trust is shifting from the faceless journalists behind a well-known newsroom to the reporters working independently from bombarded and often inaccessible zones. Wilson Fache is one of those journalists working to rebuild readers’ trust through his reporting. You might come across his name before you realize it is yet another story from war, but this time knowing who is the person behind the lines.
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