Reporter wins unfair dismissal suit

In 2003, long-time war correspondent Richard Gizbert turned down requests by ABC News to cover the war in Iraq. In 2004, Gizbert's freelance contract with the network was terminated.

Last week, a British employment tribunal ruled in Gizbert's favor, agreeing that his dismissal was unfair and rejecting ABC's argument that Gizbert's dismissal and his refusal of war-zone assignment were unrelated. ABC has announced plans to appeal the ruling.

The Associated Press's Beth Gardiner reports:

Gizbert, who began working in ABC's London bureau in 1993, had been a war correspondent for years, covering conflicts in Bosnia, Chechnya and Somalia for ABC. He said he became reluctant to continue such reporting in the late 1990s as his children grew up.

BBC media correspondent Torin Douglas uses the Gizbert case to examine "The difficult game of war reporting":

War correspondents have always been a breed apart, rushing in where most of us fear to tread.

We remember John Simpson marching into Kabul and Max Hastings yomping into Port Stanley, "liberating" Afghanistan and the Falkland Islands and scooping their rivals into the bargain.

But the life of the war correspondent has never been more dangerous, according to the former BBC correspondent Martin Bell. "It is time to close the book on macho journalism", he said this week.