"Up until about 12 years ago we never, ever, wore flak jacket or helmets but now the nastiness has got worse"
About this Quote
Nostalgia is doing quiet work here, but it is weaponized nostalgia: a before-and-after that makes danger feel measurable. Kate Adie isn’t romanticizing the old days of war reporting so much as indicting the new ones. The sentence hinges on “never, ever,” a blunt little drumbeat of disbelief that turns personal memory into evidence. Then comes the pivot: “but now.” It’s not just that conflicts are more lethal; it’s that the rules that once kept a reporter legible as “press” have thinned out.
Adie’s authority is procedural as much as moral. Flak jackets and helmets are concrete objects, the kind that smuggle argument inside logistics. If the job now requires armor, the subtext is that journalism has been reclassified from witness to target. “Nastiness” is almost comically understated for someone who has seen bodies and rubble, which is precisely why it lands. She chooses a word from everyday life, a schoolyard term, to describe a geopolitical shift: violence has become less bounded, less accountable, more willing to swallow bystanders. Understatement becomes a form of accusation.
Context matters: Adie’s career spans the era when broadcasters were both coveted and, at times, begrudgingly tolerated. By the early 2000s, kidnappings, insurgencies, and information warfare turned the camera into a provocation. The line reads like a field report from the moral climate: the protective gear isn’t just safety equipment, it’s a symptom. When journalists dress like combatants to survive, the public’s access to unfiltered reality narrows, and the war gets to rewrite its own story.
Adie’s authority is procedural as much as moral. Flak jackets and helmets are concrete objects, the kind that smuggle argument inside logistics. If the job now requires armor, the subtext is that journalism has been reclassified from witness to target. “Nastiness” is almost comically understated for someone who has seen bodies and rubble, which is precisely why it lands. She chooses a word from everyday life, a schoolyard term, to describe a geopolitical shift: violence has become less bounded, less accountable, more willing to swallow bystanders. Understatement becomes a form of accusation.
Context matters: Adie’s career spans the era when broadcasters were both coveted and, at times, begrudgingly tolerated. By the early 2000s, kidnappings, insurgencies, and information warfare turned the camera into a provocation. The line reads like a field report from the moral climate: the protective gear isn’t just safety equipment, it’s a symptom. When journalists dress like combatants to survive, the public’s access to unfiltered reality narrows, and the war gets to rewrite its own story.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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