THE WOMEN WHO BRING THE WAR TO TV; WESTERN NETWORKS MAKE FULL USE OF FEMALE REPORTERS IN KOSOVO CONFLICT

April 17, 1999 – (Canadian Press article in The Record – Waterloo, Ontario) Nancy Durham has a checklist. "It's like what I do when I walk home at night: Is it lit? Are there people around? Is it okay?"

She uses the list as she walks the streets of the British university city of Oxford, where the Toronto-born journalist is now based. She also used it last week in Albania.

"Usually, I'm a good distance away from violence, but it's shifty, shaky ground," she says.

"There are a number of things I do to check: Should I go down this road, into this village, across this boundary? I think about what's the worst thing that could happen to me -- if it's that I could be detained for the night, well, I can live with that. But I would hate to be injured, obviously you would hate to be killed, and you want to get the story out, so you don't want your tape taken away or your camera broken."

A new breed

Durham, a regular contributor to CBC Newsworld, CBC-TV News and the BBC, Durham, 46, and mother to two stepdaughters, is the new breed of reporter who travels alone with a lightweight Sony Handycam. She is also the latest evolution in the female war correspondent.

Once women were noticeable for their very presence in a man's world -- intrepid American writer Martha Gellhorn, for example, or photographer Margaret Bourke-White, both of whom covered the Second World War.

Mollie McGee was the first Canadian woman war correspondent. Working for the Globe and Mail, she covered the bombing in England and flew back with the first wounded brought by air from Normandy beaches.

Margaret Ecker, an accredited war correspondent for The , was the sole woman reporter attending the official German surrender in 1945 at Reims, France.

More recently, CBC's Ann Medina was one of few women in Lebanon in the early 1980s.

In the war in Kosovo, the Canadian, the British and most of the major American networks have women reporting on the conflict.

War coverage is no longer a strictly military story.

Durham, for one, says simply that she wants to do the people stories: "I'm interested in how people get by in extraordinary circumstances, when people are shooting all around you and you still function."

The star of CNN

And then there is the Amanpour Effect: In the past decade, as conflict has become a 24-hour cable-news event, she is the chief international correspondent for Atlanta-based CNN who has, more than any other, linked the words Women and War.

Fearless, authoritative, and magnetic, Christiane Amanpour, 41, has been in every war zone and hellhole, from Rwanda to Algeria to Haiti.

She is known for her relentless, elbows-out pursuit of a story and her not-insignificant ego. She travels with two cotton shirts she rinses out and alternates, and eschews both makeup and a flak helmet. She is childless, and until her marriage to U.S. State Department spokesman James Rubin last year, had racked up a series of brief relationships.

On the road almost perpetually, she is an archetypal female correspondent in the Gellhorn mould. Does it have to be that way?

Anna Maria Tremonti, Washington correspondent for the CBC, says no. "As a single foreign correspondent with no kids, I'm in the minority."

Tremonti, 41, covered Bosnia in the early '90s, and then Iraq, Israel and Lebanon in the Middle East bureau. In the Balkans, she's doing the story from the Washington perspective.

Tremonti points out that Gellhorn, her personal hero, adopted a son on her own, and worked until she was almost 90. "You just make arrangements."