单项选择题

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The British reporter Yvonne Ridley is thankfully now home with her nine-year-old daughter, Daisy, following her release from captivity by the Taleban in Afghanistan. But the British media has made much of her family ties, which raises the question: should female journalists with children be covering a war on the front line
Two of our leading foreign correspondents, Orla Guerin, of the BBC, and Marie Colvin, of the Sunday Times, have publicly decried the notion that Ridley had no business running around Afghanistan and getting herself captured. The male correspondents, they pointed out, have children too and no one tells them off or publishes details of their "abandoned" children.
Quite so. Women have just as much business reporting from the front line. These days female correspondents are way up there among the best of them, all leaders in their field. "All of us leave people behind," says Guerin, "parents, family."
Yes, this is a Wench. Having been a Moscow correspondent during the turbulent Nineties I know all too well the emotional conflict of putting yourself into dangerous situations halfway across the world from parents you care about. But this is a millions miles removed from leaving a child behind.
Having a child is what Jane Shilling described as the "unbridgeable barrier of experience" which no parent can successfully communicate to a non-parent, just as the non-bereaved cannot empathise with the bereaved: you have to join the club to understand.
There are exceptions--the excellent Maggie O’ Kane, of the Guardian, and Christian, Lamb, of The Sunday Telegraph--but otherwise it is notable that none of the women mentioned above is a mother, and many former correspondents, such as Diana Goodman, who was the BBC’s first female foreign correspondent and, later, the first female correspondent to be posted with a child, have found hard-nosed reporting incompatible with motherhood and have moved on to home postings. So while I would fiercely defend the right of any mother to head for the trouble-spots if she wants to, the truth is that few do.
When I was expecting my first child, I heard that one of the editors on the paper I then worked for said that "a woman with a child can’t be a proper foreign correspondent’ and was duly outraged. By the time the second wave of the hechen War hit the headlines, I was a mother. While the professional side of me longed to get straight into the thick of the fighting, to my frustration and disappointment, the mother side won hands down: the carelessness of the childless had evaporated. Although I am only now prepared to admit it, there was a grain of truth in the editor’s assumption.
But is this to assume that fathers who are foreign correspondents remain unaffected "You’ll never get anyone from the BBC to admit it publicly, but according to our corporate culture we have to be Mr. Unattached and ready to go anywhere without a backward glance", says a BBC colleague. "But having children makes you more cautious--something we are now at least prepared to admit quietly to each other. "
While they may not be prepared to admit openly to caution, there is no longer—arguably thanks to the feminization of journalism any shame in admitting that fatherhood influences their reporting.
The fact that he is a father has been central to much of Fergal Keane’s sensitive reporting, while the BBC’s Ben Brown talked, on Radio 4’s From Our Own Correspondent, about how having young children meant that he can no longer remain detached when reporting atrocities involving children. "I remember reporting the Rwanda Massacres when my daughter was one year old," recalls another colleague, "I freaked out, and as soon as I got home I had to go straight to the baby’s cot and hold her. "
At a time when men are increasingly prepared to acknowledge that fatherhood affects their professional life, it is absurd that we shouldn’t admit that motherhood does too. Parenthood strips one of the urge towards heroics, but brings a new breadth to reporting. The gulf is not between male and female reporters but between those with and without children--and there is room for both.
Why are now male reporters prepared to acknowledge that fatherhood affects their reporting, too