The Line of Fire — a candid podcast about journalists in war zones

In early March, the Sky News reporter Stuart Ramsay and his film crew came under fire from a suspected Russian assassination squad in Ukraine while they were in a car on their way to Kyiv. As the bullets flew around them and the car began to disintegrate, Ramsay, who was crouched down on the back seat, recalls saying to himself: “I am going to die now, and I wonder if it’s going to hurt.” But despite being hit in the lower back by a bullet, he was able to escape along with the rest of his team. Now, two months later, he is already making plans to return to Ukraine.

In the new podcast The Line of Fire, Ramsay talks about his brush with death and a career spent putting himself in harm’s way. It is presented by the British-Iranian war reporter Ramita Navai, whose own experience in the field means she is able to ask blunt questions without seeming ghoulish.

The series isn’t only about near-death experiences, though there are plenty of those. It’s about how war reporters cope with working in such dangerous conditions, what they have learned about humanity in the face of astonishing cruelty and why they do what they do. For Ramsay, who is Sky’s longest-serving foreign correspondent, the answer to the latter is clear: “All of us do it for a reason and the reason is to bear witness,” he says.

Another of Navai’s guests is CNN’s chief international correspondent, Clarissa Ward, who has been reporting on the war in Syria for almost a decade, and before that on the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Early in her career, Ward knew that “I wanted to go to the tip of the spear, wherever that was, and try to understand the people on the other side of it.” She goes on to talk of the guilt that comes with leaving conflict zones and returning to a comfortable life back home, where she often finds it difficult to speak to friends and family about what she has seen. She also reveals how being a female reporter can have its advantages, in particular that, “In places that are more tense, I’m viewed as a curiosity rather than as a direct threat.” With the help of Navai’s gentle coaxing, her recollections are illuminating and remarkably candid.

Another new series, Silenced, from the human rights organisation Article 19, hears the stories of journalists and activists around the world who have had to fight against efforts by governments to silence them. Among the host Nicola Kelly’s interviewees are the journalist Olga Tokariuk, who speaks from a bomb shelter in western Ukraine about the invasion of her country, and Maria Baronova, former editor-in-chief of RT (formerly known as Russia Today), who discusses her hopes for an independent Russian media.